When Albert Ein­stein died in 1955 his brain was removed, appar­ent­ly for med­ical research. What is less well known is that his oph­thal­mol­o­gist, Hen­ry Abrams, also cut out the great physicist’s eyes.

“The whole thing took about 20 min­utes,” he said lat­er. “I just need­ed scis­sors and for­ceps.”

Appar­ent­ly, Abrams keeps the eyes in a bot­tle in a New Jer­sey bank. He told one of Einstein’s biog­ra­phers that “when you look into his eyes you’re look­ing into the beau­ties and mys­ter­ies of the world.”

(Okay, so these aren’t real­ly Einstein’s pick­led eyes in this pic­ture. After my biog­ra­phy of the rel­a­tiv­i­ty mae­stro was pub­lished my sis­ter gave this to me as a delight­ful­ly ghoul­ish gift. But of course it’s the thought that counts.)

Eyes and see­ing are the sub­ject of two very dif­fer­ent but equal­ly fas­ci­nat­ing new books that I’ve been review­ing. They are: The Eye: A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry by Simon Ings, and Van­i­ties of the Eye: Vision in Ear­ly Mod­ern Euro­pean Cul­ture by Stu­art Clark.

Simon Ings tells the “sprawl­ing and epic sto­ry” of the eye – a 538 mil­lion-year his­to­ry from the crys­tal eyes of the pre­his­toric trilo­bites to our very own “squishy ver­te­brate eyes”.

On the way he explores the physics of oth­er more exot­ic eyes, such as that of the drag­on­fly Anax junius. This crea­ture is blessed with the dens­est com­pound eye on the plan­et – made up of no less than 28,500 “omma­tidia”, or mini cam­era-type eyes. Spare a thought for the poor nat­u­ral­ist who had to count them all! Among the oth­er weird eyes he dis­cuss­es is the brit­tlestar (Ophio­co­ma wendtii) which “is one huge com­plex eye, its whole sur­face punc­tured by lit­tle eye­spots linked by nerve bun­dles run­ning just under the skin”.

There’s no doubt that The Eye: A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry is a feast of sci­ence and his­to­ry. But for my taste it’s rather too rich a diet. The ency­clopaedic cov­er­age of the book tends to weak­en the nar­ra­tive. But if you’re look­ing for one big book to tell you every­thing about the eye, then this may well be the one for you.

Stu­art Clark’s study is aimed at a more schol­ar­ly mar­ket. But if phras­es like “the lan­guage of veridi­cal­i­ty” or “ocu­lar­ce­ntrism” don’t put you off, then this fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry has much to offer.

His theme is how peo­ple in Europe came to dis­trust the evi­dence of their own eyes in the ear­ly mod­ern peri­od (the 15th to the 17th cen­turies). The verac­i­ty of vision was unset­tled by beliefs about how demons could trick our eyes.

Accord­ing to Clark, peo­ple viewed the Dev­il as “a con­sum­mate still life artist, able to deceive the view­er into con­fus­ing an image of some­thing for the thing itself”.

Appar­ent­ly one of the Devil’s wickedest wiles was the illu­so­ry steal­ing of penis­es.

From mad­ness and mag­ic to dreams and demons, Van­i­ties of the Eye is a detailed and dense­ly argued account of the visu­al cul­ture of this for­ma­tive peri­od. Clark’s find­ings will make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to our under­stand­ing of the rhetoric of the Ref­or­ma­tion and the scep­ti­cism which fuelled the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion. It is an impres­sive piece of research and a book which will open your eyes to a new aspect of intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry.

Most of us take see­ing for grant­ed. After all, what is there think about? You open your eyes and it’s all, well, there. But as both of these books show, vision is a com­plex and sub­tle process. And see­ing has a com­pelling his­to­ry – both bio­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al.

You can read the pub­lished review for the Guardian here.

I used to be pro­fes­sion­al­ly con­cerned with vision – I was a pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

This was one of my more com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful pic­tures, tak­en in Som­er­set.

(And just in case any­one won­ders: No, we don’t all live in thatched hous­es in Eng­land.)

There’s more of my pho­tos on Flickr if you’re inter­est­ed. I keep mean­ing to add some more…

Remem­ber the bam­boo I men­tioned in my first TNB post? Well, it’s now plant­ed and doing fine.

Which is more than can be said for my back after exca­vat­ing the hole in our back gar­den. The ground turned out to be most­ly brick and stone. I guess that’s what hap­pens if you buy a house built on indus­tri­al land.

Actu­al­ly some of the stones in the hole were rather beau­ti­ful peb­bles.

I’ve often won­dered how long it takes a riv­er or the sea to cre­ate such per­fect­ly smooth peb­bles. Not quite as long, per­haps, as it took nature to come up with the eye…

[orig­i­nal­ly post­ed on The Ner­vous Break­down]