Page:Color standards and color nomenclature (Ridgway, 1912).djvu/13



HE motive of this work is THE STANDARDIZATION OF COLORS AND COLOR NAMES.

The terminology of Science, the Arts, and various Industries has been a most important factor in the development of their present high efficiency. Measurements, weights, mathematical and chemical formulae, and terms which clearly designate practically every variation of form and structure have long been standardized; but the nomenclature of colors remains vague and, for practical purposes, meaningless, thereby seriously impeding progress in almost every branch of industry and research.

Many works on the subject of color have been published, but most of them are purely technical, and pertain to the physics of color, the painter's needs, or to some particular art or industry alone, or in other ways are unsuited for the use of the zoologist, the botanist, the pathologist, or the mineralogist; and the comparatively few works on color intended specially for naturalists have  all failed to meet the requirements, either because of an insufficient number of color samples, lack of names or other means of easy identification or designation, or faulty selection and classification of the colors chosen for illustration. More than twenty years ago the author of the present work attempted to supply the deficiency by the publication of a book containing 186 samples of named