![]() ![]() Chapters also contain short, interesting, 'boxed' articles summarizing key discoveries in eye research that are related to the rest of the material in each chapter. The book ends with an epilogue called "Time and change," which does not present a comforting account for those of us over 50 of the way accommodation, resolution and other functions change over a lifetime. Chapter 1, "The formation of the human eye," focuses on overall eye embryology, whereas most of the other chapters have sections that explain the ontogeny of the individual parts of the eye. The development of the eye is discussed in various ways. Aside from specialist reviews, this is the best text-book treatment of eye evolution that I know of. It will be news to most optometry students that the eyes of scallops and shrimps use mirrors rather than lenses, that spiders are almost the only other creatures to use 'our' kind of single chambered cornea-based optical system, or that there are five distinct types of compound eyes. The book begins with a 53-page prolog called "A brief history of eyes", which describes the optical systems of at least ten different animals in an evolutionary context. The backbone of the book consists of the 16 chapters on eye anatomy and physiology, but these are leavened by a variety of devices to inform us of the eye's evolution, development and intellectual history. an evolutionary history dealing with the emergence of our species and eyes over geological time, a developmental history that unfolds over an individual's lifetime, and an intellectual history extending back at least to the classical age of Greece, that documents human efforts to understand the eye." Part of the charm and, for me, the success of this book is the way that Oyster has permeated the solid subject matter with these three histories. ![]() As Oyster points out, the eye has several histories: ".
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