Page:Color standards and color nomenclature (Ridgway, 1912).djvu/18

 number of colors they all fail to supply a ready or convenient means of identifying and designating the colors—the principal utility of a work of this kind. It is in the latter respect that the present work is believed to meet, more nearly than any other at least, this essential requirement, and in this consists whatever originality may be claimed for it.

The "key" to the classification or arrangement herewith presented is, of course, the solar spectrum, with its six fundamental colors and intermediate hues, augmented by the series of hues connecting violet with red, which the spectrum fails to show. If, with the red-violets and violet-reds thus added to the spectrum hues, the band forming this scale be joined end to end a circle is formed in which there is continuously a gradual change of hue, step by step, from red through orange-red and red-orange to orange; orange through yellow-orange and orangeyellowto yellow; yellow through green-yellow and yellowgreen to green; green through blue-green and green-blue to blue; blue through violet-blue and blue-violet to violet; and violet through red-violet and violet-red to red—the starting-point—with intermediate connecting hues. In the solar spectrum, both prismatic and grating, but especially the former, the spaces between the adjoining distinct colors are very unequal; therefore for the present purpose an ideal scale must be constructed, so that an approximately equal number of equally distinct connecting hues shall be shown. Distinctions of hue appreciable to the normal eye are so very numerous that the criterion of convenience or practicability must determine the number of segments into which the ideal chromatic scale or circle may be divided in order to best serve the purpose in view. Careful experiment seems to have