A Natural History of Seeing

In A Natural History of Seeing author Simon Ings wisely prefaces his history with an admission that it is necessarily abridged. He evokes the image of many piles of research material stacked atop his desk to the illustrate the breadth and depth of scientific research and general historical information waiting to coalesce into the book that follows. Ings points out that he has written a book that scratches only the very surface of optical history. The reader will appreciate this preface more as the book progresses and the extent to which further exploration of any individual issue would have been possible in various places. It is good to know from the beginning, however, how the book stands to develop.

Abridgement aside, the book works very well for what it is. Ings manages to keep a coherent chronology running in the background as he discusses a variety of optical issues throughout the text. The book begins by asking a lot of questions about the eye and its complexity and function then proceeds to try and answer many of them. Ings devotes chapters to topics like color vision and color blindness, the relationship between seeing and thinking, and various manifestations of eyes in the natural world. These disparate parts do make a unifying whole somehow. That is, the text is very smooth, not scattered. The background history that traces how various scientific minds throughout history gradually understood the eye increasingly accurately helps to tie the tangents together and serves as their impetus as well.

Ings is also an entertaining writer. It takes a certain command of style to coherently tackle a topic as broad as "seeing," but he manages this task well. The unfortunate problem with this text is that so much necessarily must be omitted. Though this is no fault of the author, as a reader (and wearer of glasses or contacts since I was 8) I found myself hoping to read about topics that never got covered. To be sure, Ings did get to a lot of interesting observations on optical illusions and some of the phenomena familiar to me from comprehensive eye exams, but some optical questions of mine persist. What's the theory behind letters used in eye exams? What manifestations have eyeglasses taken throughout history? How did people deal with poor vision before eyeglasses were widely available? These questions, in addition to a curiosity for oddities of medicine and perception, went by without being addressed, often eclipsed by discussions of the eye as it appears outside of the human context. This was not to the detriment of the book as regards content, but my interests did not quite match up with Ings' judgment of what to include.

My guess is that this would be the case for any reader curious about optics. Ings provides something for everyone, no doubt, but everyone is also going to be left wanting something more. Ings saw this from the beginning though and ultimately succeeded in writing an entertaining and enlightening survey of optical history and science. He could conceivably write the entire book again and not repeat any information. For my part, I would certainly be interested in volume two.