PREFACE.
Everyeffort of human ingenuity professing to remove or lessen pain and inconvenience, is, naturally enough, hailed with approbation, and the public require not so much to be aroused to estimate fully the advantages proposed, as to be guarded against implicit belief and heedless confidence in the value and importance of the remedy. It is, however, of the utmost importance to be accurately informed what kind of benefit we may fairly expect from the use of the given means, and to what extent this benefit may be obtained; and yet the man who steps forward to state this plainly and fairly, too often fails of the success which his undertaking deserves. Experience proves that such endeavours have been contemned by some, looked upon with cold indifference by others, and viewed with suspicion by nearly all. We are too apt to suspect interested motives, to doubt the sincerity, and undervalue the abilities of men, who have devoted their lives, and the force of their talents, to a particular pursuit; and then, as though this cunning incredulity was closely allied to implicit credence in the wildest chimeras, we become ready listeners, and passive victims, to pompous and plausible charlatans, who make the largest promises, alike indifferent to the practicability or usefulness of their specifics. “It is a great mistake,” said an able English statesman of the last century, “to suppose men harmless because they are blockheads; the dunce thinks neither of country nor of consequences in the pursuit of his petty interests and passions, which may, and often do, lead him to work the greatest public calamities.”
I have refrained from advancing any crude theoretical opinions, which might fairly be questioned. The information conveyed in these pages is of a practical character; has stood the purifying test of time; and, being based upon the immutable principles of optical science, courts every enquiry and challenges all investigation.
My object has been to provide the public with a compendium of sound and standard information on this most interesting and essential subject, in order that, possessing themselves of the truth, and becoming conversant with the real merits of the question, they may no longer be the victims of ignorant, designing, and knavish speculators, who so mercilessly practise on their credulity. I have freely availed myself of facts and observations with which I have become familiar in the course of my own experience and connexion with an establishment of more than one hundred years’ standing, and, at the same time, have endeavoured to condense in one publication the essence of many voluminous treatises.
“It is only by condensing, simplifying, and arranging in the most lucid manner possible, the acquired knowledge of past generations, that those to come can be enabled to avail themselves to the full of the advanced point from which they will start.”
I have only to add, that though I would not desire to offend the critical acumen of any of my readers, yet, having but little leisure, and those moments of rest being snatched from the busy whirl of commercial pursuits, I have been much more anxious to give solid information in language universally understood, and divested of technicalities, than to employ nice set terms, chosen to please the critic’s curious ear.
GEORGE COX.
The first edition of this work having found a ready sale, spite of all the opposition and abuse lavished against it by the itinerantopticians, I have reprinted it with such improvements as the kindness of friends and my own experience have suggested.
128,Holborn Hill, London,January, 1844.