This book is written for our friends in Germany and abroad to give an
account of our main interests during the last years. We gratefully take
the opportunity provided by Springer Verlag with the Series Studies of
Brain Function to present some of our recent work on vision in
Drosophila in a coherent form and in a broader context than publications
in periodicals would permit. We want to picture the visual system of the
fly fitting it into the natural history from which our own vision
emerged. In this perspective genetics seems to be a useful ap- proach.
Our study is a rather personal exercise. We have neither the expertise
nor the ambition to cover the whole literature or to compile- all the
knowledge about vision in flies. We are not even in a position to
present, with the appropriate weight and breadth, the pioneering
contributions of those who established this field of research. Our
account mirrors our own intersects. We are selecting and interpreting
other peoples' work from this subjective point of view, although we try
to present it in its own right. For several years we have been
fascinated by the first glimpses of the "inner life" of an insect and we
hope to convey this fascination to those who are not discouraged by the
scien- tific procedure.