With the Children on Sundays: Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-SoulStall, Sylvanus
Religion
With the Children on Sundays: Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul
Stall, Sylvanus
Children -- Religious life; Children's sermons; Moral education
To illustrate my thought, I have to-day brought a camera. Sometimes such
a camera as this is called a Kodak or Snap-shot. As the finest
telescopes have been modeled after the human eye, so the camera is only
a very imperfect imitation of the human eye. As the spy-glass and
telescope have lenses, so does this camera have a lens, which you see
here in the front. Just back of this lens is the dark chamber in the
camera, and back of it is a ground glass, as you will see here. Now
whatever is directly in front of the camera is shown on the ground
glass, as you will observe, but in an inverted or up-side-down position.
So the eye has its various parts, and as the rays of light pass through
this lens and reflect the picture on this ground glass, so rays of light
coming from any object pass first through the small opening of the eye,
to the retina, where the picture is inverted just the same as upon the
ground glass. When this picture is thrown upon the rear wall of the eye,
which is called the retina, the seeing nerve, which is called the optic
nerve and is connected with the eye, conveys the impression to the
brain, and the result is what we call seeing.
[Illustration: The Human Eye.]
What I have told you is correct, and can easily be proven by a simple
experiment with the eye of some animal. If you take the eye of a dead
rabbit, and cleanse the back portion of it from the fat and muscles and
then hold a candle in front of it, you can see the image of the candle
formed upon the retina. If you take the eye of an ox and carefully pare
off from the back portion, so as to leave it very thin, and place the
eye in front of (or against) a small hole made in a box; then cover your
head to shut out the light you will see through the box the picture of
any object which is directly in front of this eye of the ox. In both
instances they will be in the inverted form. This experiment would fully
demonstrate to you that the camera is only an imitation, and a very poor
one too, of the human eye.
Now when pictures are taken by means of the camera, the negative can not
be exposed to the light, but must be taken into a dark room, and be
carefully developed by the use of necessary chemicals or liquids. Then
specially prepared paper must be used for printing the photographs. This
paper must also be kept in the dark until it has been thoroughly washed
and cleansed. But, with the pictures which are taken upon the retina of
the eye, no such delay and labor is necessary before you can look at
them. The moment the eye is turned in any direction, instantly the
picture is photographed upon the retina of the eye, and then stamped
indelibly upon the memory and becomes a part of ourselves.
There is no cost for chemicals, no delay in adjusting the instrument
with which the picture is taken, no necessity for carrying around a
large camera.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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