Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/461

Rh discriminated yellow. Miss Shinn found that yellow was her niece's first favorite color, and, in her twenty-eighth month, she had a special fondness for daffodils and for a yellow gown. Mrs. Moore found that in the sixteenth week her child chose a yellow ball in preference to a red, and, later, in the forty-fifth week, six times out of ten preferred the yellow ball. Binet's child could not readily distinguish yellow, but was especially successful with orange. A lady who made some experiments for me with a Belgian child one year of age found that when successively offered a red poppy and a yellow poppy, then red, white and yellow poppies, finally red, white, orange and yellow poppies, she on all three occasions chose the yellow poppy, though on the third trial she hesitated between the orange and the yellow poppies; when she passed yellow poppies growing she would point to them and want them, and was also observed to contemplate admiringly a sunflower, though usually indifferent to flowers of other colors, except pink geraniums. At this age, no doubt, the preference for yellow is mainly a question of luminosity, for the careful investigations of Garbini on a large number of children showed that under the age of three they may almost be described as color-blind and experience a special difficulty in distinguishing yellow, which even at a somewhat later age is often confused with orange. When children show genuine color preferences, they appear, like adults, to be only to a slight degree attracted by brilliancy, but to a large extent by depth of saturation. This was found to be the case by Aars, who in testing color preferences used colored papers of similar brilliancy and depth. His results indicate that, as Barnes had already found, children's love of yellow diminishes with age; even between the ages of four and seven, though yellow was still one of the most favorite colors of the boys, it had ceased to be in any degree a favorite color with the girls. Lobsien, at Kiel, investigating the color preferences of a large number of school girls between the ages of eight and fourteen, reached congruent results; he adopted the method of offering the colors in pairs, and found that while orange was never preferred to any other color, there was a tendency at all ages to prefer yellow to green and usually to violet, but never to red or blue. These results harmonize with the conclusion of Garbini that in discrimination of color girls are more precocious than boys, though it must be added that, as in physical development, the period of adolescence brings to an end this greater rapidity of girls in development; thus Wissler, in comparing the color preferences of freshmen and seniors of both sexes, found (as Jastrow had previously found) that with age there is a shifting of preference towards the violet end of the spectrum which is the favorite end of men, red being that of women.