“Everything right, so far. They’re healthy young animals and can meet the ordinary demands of school life. But no more study at night, for some years, for Charley; and no more, ever, of fine-printed maps. Some day, Charley, you may go to the Orinoco. It’s a good deal more desirable that you should be able to see what there is to be seen there, then, than that you should learn, now, the name of every infinitesimally designated town on its banks.” “In my childhood,” observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality proper to that classic introductory phrase, “we thought more of our brains than our eyes.” “An inverted principle. The brain can think for itself. The eye can only complain, and not always very clearly in the case of a child. Moreover, Mrs. Sharpless, in your school-days the eye wasn’t under half the strain that it is in our modern, print-crowded world. The fact is, we’ve made a tremendous leap forward, and radically changed a habit and practice built up through hundreds and thousands of years, and Nature is struggling against great difficulties to catch up with us.” “I don’t understand what you are getting at,” said Mrs. Clyde, letting her magazine drop. “Have you tried walking on all fours lately?” inquired the physician. “Not for a number of years.” “Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure of necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal method, the alteration in life would be less radical than we have imposed upon our vision in the last few generations.” “Sounds like flat nonsense to me,” said the downright Clyde. “We see just as all our ancestors saw.” “Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an outdoor race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range over far distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the time by four walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival depended upon their being far-sighted; like the animals which they killed or which killed them, according as the human or the beast had the best eyes. Nowadays, in order to live we must read and write. That is, the primal demand upon the eye is that it shall see keenly near at hand instead of far off. The whole hereditary training of the organ has been inverted, as if a mountaineer should be set to diving for pearls; and the poor thing hasn’t had time to adjust itself yet. We employ our vision for close work ten times as much as we did a hundred years ago and ten thousand times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But the influence of those ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and the human child is born with the eye of a savage or an animal.” “What kind of an animal’s eyes have I got?” demanded Bettina. “A antelope’s?” “Almost as far-sighted,” returned the Health Master, wriggling out from under her and catching her expertly as she fell. “And how do you think an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?”