Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/55

Rh which we may gather that the people who wrote them had any idea of blue. Geiger advanced the view that there had been an evolution of the color sense in historical times; and he supposed that this evolution had been of such a kind that red had been distinguished first, followed by yellow and green, and that the sense for blue had developed much later than that for the other colors. Magnus came to the same conclusions on the basis of a still more extended examination of ancient writings, and Gladstone, in 1877, again called the attention of English scholars to the subject in the pages of the 'Nineteenth Century.'

The subject was taken up both from the literary and scientific points of view. On the literary side it was objected that the special peculiarities of the color terminology of Homer were due to a characteristic of epic style, according to which attention is paid to form rather than to color. It was also pointed out that the language of some modern poets presents the same peculiarities as those of ancient literature. Grant Allen counted the color-epithets used in Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads' and found that red occurred much more frequently than blue, and a similar preponderance of red was found to be a feature of Tennyson's 'PrincesPrincess [sic].' Instances were also given of individual peculiarity in the use of color by many modern poets, one instance being La Fontaine, who, according to Javal, only used an epithet for blue once in the whole of his poems.

On the scientific side, also, objections were raised. It so happened that about 1877 there were in Germany two parties of Nubians going from town to town in traveling caravans. These Nubians were examined by Virchow and others, and it was found that they exhibited the same peculiarity of color language as ancient writers; they had no word for blue, or, rather, they used the same word for blue as for black or for dark colors generally. On examination, it was found, however, that they were not color blind, and that they sorted colored papers and wools correctly. It was, therefore, concluded that the ideas of Gladstone and Geiger were altogether erroneous, and that there was no necessary connection between color sense and color language.

In this country the views of Gladstone and Geiger were submitted to a comprehensive criticism by Grant Allen in the book, 'The Color Sense,' already cited. The strongest objection raised by this author was based on the existence of a well-developed color sense in many of the lower animals, and it was argued that this sense could not therefore be defective in primitive man. He also brought forward evidence that many existing primitive races made large use of color, and cited the