Science: In a Pig's Eye

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Photographer Ralph P. Creer of Chicago, who specializes in medical pictures, had often heard that human and animal eyes are natural cameras. But he had never seen any pictures taken with them. Creer got a collection of pig, sheep and beef eyes from Chicago's stockyards and set to work.

First he tried to put photographic film into an eye near the center of the retina, the point where the lens brings the image naturally to a focus. This did not work; eye fluids ruined the film. So he cut a small hole in the rear of the eyeball and placed in it a disk of film about as big as a pea. When an object was held six inches away, the lens of the eye brought its image to a focus on the film. The aperture of this "camera," he figured, was somewhere between fI.9 and f3.

Then, using a slow film and a flash attachment, Creer took a series of photographs—of newspaper headlines, trademarks, comic strips—which he showed last week to a New York meeting of the Biological Photographic Association. The pictures were clear enough, considering the size of the film, but they were somewhat distorted because an eye lens is intended to focus on a curved surface, not on a flat film.

Creer wants to make clear that pigs, sheep and steers do not necessarily see what their eyes "saw" when they were used as cameras. The image on the retina is "assembled" in the brain into a visual image. No one knows what the brain of a pig may make of a comic strip.