PRIMITIVE COLOR VISION. 45 



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 con- 

 clusions 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.' t 



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 char- 

 acteristic 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 litera- 

 ture. Grant Allen t counted the color-epithets used in Swinburne's 

 Toems 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 'Princes.' Instances were also given of individual pecul- 

 iarity in the use of color by many modem 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 exam- 

 ined 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 Glad- 

 stone and Geiger were altogether erroneous, and that there was no nec- 

 essary 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 



* 'Die gesohichtliche Entwickelung des Farbensinnes,' Leipzig, 1877. 



t Vol. n., p. 366 ; 1877. 



J 'The Ck)lor Sense.' London, 1879: p. 264. 



§ 'Bull, de la See. d'Anthropologie de Paris.' T. XII., p. 480; 1877. 



