THE LAST THING HE SAW

 

JK

I was listening to Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down" from "After The Gold Rush" (1970) which I had not heard in ages and was struck (as in the past) with this line:

Dead man lying by the side of the road
With the daylight in his eyes

It brought up a memory of how years ago, folks thought that the last thing seen before death would be recorded in the eyes. 

From Wiki:

Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, an image on the retina of the eye. A belief that the eye "recorded" the last image seen before death was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a frequent plot device in fiction of the time, to the extent that police photographed the victims' eyes in several real-life murder investigations, in case the theory was true.