Right-eyed, or left-eyed?
Published 12:00 am Saturday, May 30, 2015
Are you right-eyed or left-eyed? Am I nuts asking such a question? Well, I read that most humans have a dominant eye. So that question makes sense. How can we answer it? According to my source of information, it works just like our being left-handed or right-handed.
There is a way to test yourself to learn your dominant eye. First, you need a pencil. Now hold it vertically at your eye level. Line the point up with a distant object and close one eye at a time. Your dominant eye is the one that is open when you see the pencil lined up with that object. I tried it and found out my right eye is the dominant one.
Have you ever wondered about insects’ eyes? What about the eyes of animals? If you were a housefly sitting on a blade of a houseplant and I approached, how do you think I would appear to you? Those tiny eyes would pick up 4,000 images of me. Amazing, is it not?
If I were a horse, I would frame your image through a horizontal slot. How do you think your cat views you? It sees you through a vertical slot and has up-and-down vision in comparison to the horse’s side-to-side vision.
Some months ago, I found an active beehive in the cavity of an oak tree in my back yard. The bees were in perpetual motion. I was not aware of it at the time, but now I know that bees have compound eyes made up of thousands of lenses joined together. If they got a look at me, they must have seen me as a scary creature.
If you enjoy fishing or even watching goldfish swimming in a tank, have you noticed that fish do not have eyelids or tear ducts? Why? There is a simple answer. They live in water, so they don’t need them.
Have you ever wondered about a pair of eyes reflecting from a flash of light in the dark? They no doubt belong to some animal, like a cat, which has an extra membrane behind the inner layer of the eyeball—the retina. The retina acts as a mirror to bounce the light back.
Some creatures have larger eyes than humans do. An eagle comes to mind. And owls are certainly big-eyed birds. Their eyes are a third as large as their heads.
Most fish and animals that live in darkness are blind.
We feel about our eyes the way we do about many things God has blessed us with. We take them for granted. But if we have a problem with them, we suddenly realize just how important they are. We get concerned and have them checked, perhaps coming home with some drops or ointment we use for a few days. As soon as the hurt goes away, we forget and go right back to taking our precious gift of sight for granted once more—something we humans are prone to do.