The description that follows, which is quoted by Fournier and is readily accessible to any one, is well worth reading, as it contains an account of the first sensations of light, objects, distance, etc., and minor analogous thoughts, of an educated and matured mind experiencing its first sensations of sight.
Hansell and Clark say that the perplexities of learning to see after twenty-six years of blindness from congenital disease, as described by a patient of Franke, remind one of the experience of Shelley's Frankenstein.

Franke's patient was successfully operated on for congenital double cataract, at twenty-six years of age.

The author describes the difficulties the patient had of recognizing by means of vision the objects he had hitherto known through his other senses, and his slowness in learning to estimate distances and the comparative size of objects.
Sight is popularly supposed to be occasionally restored without the aid of art, after long years of blindness.

Benjamin Rush saw a man of forty-five who, twelve years before, became blind without ascertainable cause, and recovered his sight equally without reason.

St.Clair mentions Marshal Vivian, who at the age of one hundred regained sight that for nearly forty years had gradually been failing almost to blindness, and preserved this new sight to the time of his death.
There are many superstitions prevalent among uneducated people as to "second sight," recovery of vision, etc., which render their reports of such things untrustworthy.