Development Abnormalities of the Eye

Abstract

THE dependence of the empirical sciences on the pure sciences, and the essential value of research in the latter, even although at the timeit seems merely academic and of little practical utility, if the former are to evolve on rational lines, are nowhere better exemplified than in the advances which have taken place in our knowledge of congenital defects and aberrations in the visual organs. Two factors have lately combined to revolutionize our conceptions of ocular malformations: a widespread interest in what may be called the science of experimental embryology, whereby defects are produced by chemical or physical traumata on the developing organism and, in some cases, are systematically perpetuated by in-breeding, and the immense improvements in the methods of clinical study rendered available by innovations in the technique of clinical observation, such as the slit-lamp, whereby minute changes which hitherto had either escaped attention or had been looked upon as incidental and of no importance, can be intimately studied and adequately assessed. As a result, quite a number of new developmental aberrations have been discoveredin the last two decades, the common occurrence of others which before had been considered rare has been established, and in many more our knowledge has been widened and co-ordinated, so that what had hitherto been vague conceptions stimulating the elaboration of (in some cases) a dozen or more explanatory hypotheses by the ingenious, has been rationalized and set upon scientific foundations.

Development Abnormalities of the Eye

By Dr. Ida Mann. (Published for the British Journal of Ophthalmology. ) Pp. xi + 444. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1937.) 50s. net.