The mirror of the soul? In Homo sapiens, maybe. But in this account of that remarkable organ, the eye, Ings goes beyond the human. Here, for example, is the compound eye on the antenna of the fruit fly. Ings is just as fond of the surface-feeding fish Anableps anableps of South and Central America, which has four eyes, two for above

the waterline and two for below. Robots built with Mars in mind are the recipients of “a new generation of mechanical eyes” which, “like dragonflies, detect the line of the horizon, using ocelli made up of a handful of ommatidia”.

Ings deals crisply with such science. The more complex his material, the clearer his prose becomes: “Immediately behind the human retina, cupping the pigment-stuffed tips of the photoreceptive rod and cone cells, lies a single layer of cells, the pigment epithelium”, which “stops light scattering off the back of the eye”. He is equally at ease with mathematics, philosophy, palaeontology and history in this cornucopia of facts and folklore about the eye. The books also abounds in fascinating asides, such as the regressive consequences, as far as our understanding of diet is concerned, of Pasteur's germ theory.

A little humour, however, would have gone a long way, and I could have done without the saccharine references to Ings's daughter and her ocular progress. These things aside, this far-ranging and wonderfully eclectic work is popular science at its best.

The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings
Bloomsbury, £8.99

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