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Now, in such a case, for a height of one hundred feet above the sea-level the image of the sea-horizon would be depressed below the image of the eye-pupil by less than three hundredths of an inch an amount which could not be detected by one eye in a hundred.
It is not necessary to suppose here that the mirror was wrongly adjusted, though the slightest error of adjustment would affect the result either favourably or unfavourably for Parallax's flat-earth theory. It is a matter of fact that, if the mirror were perfectly vertical, only very acute vision could detect the depression of the image of the sea-horizon below the image of the eye-pupil.
The true horizon will then be seen to be visibly below the centre of the eye-pupil visibly in this case because the horizontal line traced on the mirror can be made to coincide with the sea-horizon exactly, and will then be found not to coincide with the centre of the eye-pupil.
At once in the half-curtained doorway to the next room appeared a stocky little woman, whose pale face was made emphatic by large steel-rimmed glasses that shrank each eye-pupil to the size of a tack-head. Her worried forehead smoothed; she smiled. "I knew it was Mr. Joe," she said, "by the way those gals yelled." Joe spoke eagerly: "I just had to run in, Mrs. Rann, to ask how the baby was."
Here, then, seemed to be proof positive that there is no depression of the sea-horizon; for the horizontal line to the image of the eye-pupil seemed to coincide exactly with the line to the image of the sea-horizon.
The depression can easily be calculated for any given circumstances. Parallax encouraged observers to note very closely the position of the eye-pupil in the image, so that most of them approached the image within about ten inches, or the glass within about five.
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