Part 32

“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?”

“But, Strong, few of us go blind,” said Mr. Clyde. “And of those who do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren’t all groping, sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability of our eyes. And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone to impose; working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of accommodation, whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly powerful; far more so than in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force her vision to almost any kind of work and the eye would not complain much—at this time. But later on the effects would be manifest. Therefore we have to watch the eye very closely until it begins to grow old, which is at about twelve years or so. In the adult the eye very readily lets its owner know if anything is wrong. Only fools disregard that warning. But in the developing years we must see to it that those muscles, set to the task of overcoming generations of custom, do not overwork and upset the whole nervous organization. Sometimes glasses are necessary; usually, only care.”

“In a few generations we’ll all have four eyes, won’t we?” asked Bobs, making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled fingers and thumbs.

“Oh, let’s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give the future man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the other way, and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit itself for its work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the penalty of the change. That’s a small price for living in this wonderful century.”

“You say that half the blind are needlessly so,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Is that from preventable disease?”

“About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus’s dance and epilepsy.”

“But you’re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr. Strong,” said Julia.

“There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of information,” said the Health Master with a smile. “Junkum has made an important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.”

“Maybe they’ve been crying,” suggested Bettykin.

“They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn’t mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting appearance. They had each a developing case of pink-eye.”

“Horses have pink-eye, not people,” remarked Grandma Sharpless.

“To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but it isn’t if properly cared for. Only, it’s quite contagious. Therefore the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished the temporary removal of those children from school.”

“And then,” the Committee joyously took up the tale, “we went out and trailed the pink-eye.”

“We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still allows to exist.”

“In the school?” said Bettykin. “Oo-oo! What was it?”

“It was a Rollertowl,” replied the doctor impressively and in a sonorous voice.

“I never heard of it,” said the Cherub, awestruck. “What is it like?”

“He means a roller-towel, goosie,” explained Julia. “A towel on a roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.”

“Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I’d as soon put a rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn’t the worst. There was one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by her, through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is a serious disease.”

“Did you throw out the roller-towel?” asked Charley with a hopeful eye to a fray.

“No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn’t we, Junkum?”

“Pretty near,” corroborated Julia. “The principal told Dr. Strong that he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn’t need any interference by—by—what did he call us, Dr. Strong?”

“Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope. It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now writhing in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.”