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THE BULL OPTOMETER.

Dr. Javal has just presented to the Academy of Medicine a very ingenious and practical optometer devised by George J. Bull, a young American doctor, after a number of researches made at the laboratory of ophthalmology at the Sorbonne.  Among other applications that can be made of it, there is one that is quite original and that will insure it some success in the world.  It permits, in fact, of approximately deducing the age of a person from certain data that it furnishes as to his or her sight.  As well known, the organs become weak with age, their functions are accomplished with less regularity and precision, and, according to the expression of the poet,

  “En marchant a la mort, on meurt a chaque pas,”

the senses become blunted, the hearing becomes dull, the eyes lose their luster, vivacity, and strength, and vision becomes in general shorter, less piercing, and less powerful.

The various parts of the eye, but more particularly the crystalline lens, undergo modifications in form and structure.  Accommodation is effected with more and more difficulty, and, toward the age of sixty, it can hardly be effected at all.

These changes occur in emmetropics as well as in hypermetropics and myopics.

As will be seen, then, there is a relation between the age of a person and the amplitude of the accommodation of his eyes.  If we cannot express a law, we can at least, through statistics, find out, approximately, the age of a person if we know the extent of the accommodation of his eyes.

A Dutch oculist, Donders, has got up a table in which, opposite the amplitudes, the corresponding ages are found.  Now, the Javal-Bull optometer permits of a quick determination of the value of the amplitude of accommodation in dioptries. (A dioptrie is the power of a lens whose focal distance is one meter.)

The first idea of this apparatus is due to the illustrious physicist Thomas Young, who flourished about a century ago.  The Young apparatus is now a scarcely known scientific curiosity that Messrs. Javal and Bull have resuscitated and transformed and completed.

It consists of a light wooden rule about 24 inches long by 11/4 inch wide that can easily be held in the hand by means of a handle fixed at right angles with the flat part (Fig. 1).  At one extremity there is a square thin piece of metal of the width of the rule, and at right angles with the latter, but on the side opposite the handle.  This piece of metal contains a circular aperture a few hundredths of an inch in diameter (Fig. 3).  Toward this aperture there may be moved either a converging lens of five dioptries or a diverging lens of the same diameter, but of six dioptries.

[Illustration:  FIG 1.—­MODE OF USING THE BULL OPTOMETER]

On holding the apparatus by the handle and putting the eye to the aperture, provided or not with a lens, we see a series of dominoes extending along the rule, from the double ace, which occupies the extremity most distant from the eye, to the double six, which is very near the eye (Fig. 2).  The numbers from two to twelve, simply, are indicated, but this original means of representing them has been chosen in order to call attention to them better.