Still an unsatisfactory answer! I once knew a professor who would shut with horror the mouths of his pupils if they put to him such an unscientific question. But ask a more tolerant person, ask me. I, I candidly confess, do not know exactly why man has two eyes, but the reason partly is, I think, that I may see you here before me to-night and talk with you upon this delightful subject. Again you smile incredulously. Now this is one of those questions that a hundred wise men together could not answer. You have heard, so far, only five of these wise men. You will certainly want to be spared the opinions of the other ninety-five. To the first you will reply that we should look just as pretty if we were born with only one eye, like the Cyclops; to the second we should be much better off, according to his principle, if we had four or eight eyes, and that in this respect we are vastly inferior to spiders; to the third, that you are not just in the mood to weep; to the fourth, that the unqualified interdiction of the question excites rather than satisfies your curiosity; while of me you will dispose by saying that my pleasure is not as intense as I think, and certainly not great enough to justify the existence of a double eye in man since the fall of Adam. But since you are not satisfied with my brief and obvious answer, you have only yourselves to blame for the consequences. You must now listen to a longer and more learned explanation, such as it is in my power to give. As the church of science, however, debars the question "Why?" let us put the matter in a purely orthodox way: Man has two eyes, what _more_ can he see with two than with one? I will invite you to take a walk with me? We see before us a wood. What is it that makes this real wood contrast so favorably with a painted wood, no matter how perfect the painting may be? What makes the one so much more lovely than the other? Is it the vividness of the coloring, the distribution of the lights and the shadows? I think not. On the contrary, it seems to me that in this respect painting can accomplish very much. The cunning hand of the painter can conjure up with a few strokes of his brush forms of wonderful plasticity. By the help of other means even more can be attained. Photographs of reliefs are so plastic that we often imagine we can actually lay hold of the elevations and depressions. [Illustration: Fig. 20.] But one thing the painter never can give with the vividness that nature does--the difference of near and far. In the real woods you see plainly that you can lay hold of some trees, but that others are inaccessibly far. The picture of the painter is rigid. The picture of the real woods changes on the slightest movement. Now this branch is hidden behind that; now that behind this. The trees are alternately visible and invisible.