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breadth, are not the products of direct vision, but of vision modified by innumerable judgments, and mingled with them. The most of them we form unconsciously, and learned to make early in life, their accuracy and ease being increased by every day's experience. How many things come in to determine our estimates of the distances of surrounding objects, the clearness or faintness of colors, the depth of blue cast upon them by the atmosphere, their apparent size, intervening objects and the muscular adjustment of the eyes in their perception. Most have probably experienced in some moment of relative abstraction, an exaggerated or false impression made by some object or objects seen, but not observed, and marked the instantaneousness with which these flashed into their true form upon the first distinct direction of the eye toward them. The relative position and size of objects are also almost wholly a matter of judgment; the eye itself only records their angular separation. It reduces them to a map-surface, and leaves their relations and distances unrecorded. Angles, not lines, are contemplated by it. The distances outward from the eye, and hence laterally also, are wholly a matter of experience.

To these judgments are to be added those which turn on light and shade, and from these data arrive at the most complex surfaces. We thus see that the pure visual data of sight are very meagre, and bear no more resemblance and intimate connection to the world in which we live than do the canvas and the paints thereon, as canvas and paints merely, to the landscape represented. This saturation of a sense by the understanding, this inflation of a single drop by the breath of rational thought into a brilliant sphere, and the acquired ability to do this as child's play, are the noticeable features of this, our highest organ of perception, quite distinguishing it from such an organ as that of taste,