James Jurin (1684-1750): A pioneer of crowding research?

James Jurin wrote an extended essay on distinct and indistinct vision in 1738. In it, he distinguished between perfect,'' distinct,'' and indistinct vision'' as perceptual categories, and his meticulous descriptions and analyses of perceptual phenomena contained observations that are akin to crowding. Remaining with the concepts of his day, however, he failed to recognize crowding as separate from spatial resolution. We present quotations from Jurin's essay and place them in the context of the contemporary concerns with visual resolution and crowding.