Excerpt from Archives of Ophthalmology, Vol. 24: Edited in English and German Prof. Wahlfors has greatly honored me by subjecting to a detailed critique my theory of strabis. mus, in which he fails to see anything at all correct. All strabismus theories, Schweigger's, Stilling's, Wahlfors', and my own, for instance, arc unsubstantial, of course, but Prof. Wahlfors' summary of my theory is so incorrect, and his own is so false, that I must ask an opportunity to give in these Archives a brief resume of my actual train of thought. In order to discover the origin of strabismus, it is important to know the actual position which the eyes occupy when at rest, e., the anatomical position of rest resulting from the form of the orbit, the insertion of the optic nerve, and the natural length of the muscles when not innervated. Many things go to show that this position is more or less divergent, rarely parallel, and hardly ever convergent. This anatomical position of rest is the starting-point of every co-ordinate action of the interni; it is the absolute zero point of convergence. The function of the eyes never allows divergence. Hence the parallel direction demanded for distance can never be abandoned whilst we arc awake, and the innervation of convergence, which pulls the eyes from the anatomical position of rest to parallelism, is simply maintained by habit, by which expression I mean unconscious innervation. Therefore parallelism is the position which we find exclusively in eyes with normal refraction and binocular vision. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."