ABSTRACT
Ames came from a distinguished American family. Confusingly, his father's name was also Adelbert Ames, who also worked on vision - on the optics of the eye, measuring its chromatic aberration and changes of focus with different colours. I shall now refer only to his son, Adelbert Ames Jnr. He started out as a lawyer but not being successful he turned from man-made laws to seeking laws of vision - first in painting with carefully graded colours, then in perceptual experiments with weird-shaped objects and distorted rooms. Like his father he became expert in optics, designing camera lenses from structures of the human eye. He designed lenses giving different magnifications horizontally or vertically, which he came to use in his perceptual research. (These are aniseikonic lenses, like astigmatism: Ames 1945, 1946.)
His formal scientific papers were few but indications of how he worked and something of the development of his ideas are to be found in the occasional jottings that he called his Morning Notes. These are disjointed, somewhat repetitive memoranda, starting in August 1941 and ending in May 1955. Not intended for publication they were, however, published in 1960, together with a correspondence with John Dewey, late in his life, entitled The Morning Notes of Adelbert Ames Jr., edited by Ames's friend and colleague, Hadley Cantril (Cantril 1960). They are mainly on perception seen as transactions between the observer and the world. A principal question is: What are the day-today transactions we make with reality, to survive? As with any transactions, time is important.
