Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/60

50 absent from so many languages. The fact is perhaps the more strange in that the word 'brown' bears evidence of having arisen in an early stage of our language, and is not, like violet or orange, obviously of recent origin.

The special characteristics of primitive color language appear, then, to be the following: The existence of a definite name for red, sometimes with subsidiary names for shades of red; a definite name for orange and yellow; indefinite nomenclature for green; absence of a word for blue, or confusion of the terms for blue and green, and absence of a word for brown, a brown object being called red, yellow or dark, according to its prevailing character.

These features closely resemble those of Homers color terminology, Homer uses several words for red, φοῖνιξ, φοίνιος, μίλτος, ὲρνρὀςθ and πορφύρεος; he has a definite word for yellow, ξανθός, an indefinite word for green, χλωρός; and no word for blue. Two words which later came to mean blue, γλανκός and κυάνεος were used by Homer, but it can not be said that the terms mean more than 'light' and 'dark' respectively. There seems now to be little doubt that κύανος, the substance, was 'lapis lazuli" and also an imitation of this substance made by coloring a glass paste with salts of copper, but κυάνεος is not used by Homer as an epithet for any distinctively blue object (except κύανος,), while it is used for a perfectly black garment. The substance, κύανος, is also qualified in one place, as μέλας.

There appears, also, to be no word for brown in Homer, but brown or brownish objects are qualified by the same adjectives which are used for red, thus φοῖνιξ is used for the color of a horse, and ζαφοινός is applied to jackals and the skin of a lion.

The resemblance is so striking that the conclusion seems irresistible that we have to do in Homer with a color vocabulary in the same early stage of development which is found among many primitive races at the present day. Indeed, one might almost go so far as to say that Homer's terminology for color is in a stage of development which is on much the same level as that of Kiwai, and distinctly less developed than those of Murray Island and Mabuiag.

From the nature of the defects of language, it has been concluded that the color sense of both ancient and existing primitive races is in some way defective. The next stage in the inquiry is to investigate the color sense of some existing people, and this I have been able to do most satisfactorily in Mun-ay Island. I tested about 150 natives of this island with Holmgren's wools for color-blindness, and failed to find one case in which there was any confusion between red and green, the