58 rOPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The observations made on the color vision of childhood may be 

 regarded as indirect evidence that color vision has been a comparatively 

 recent acquirement of the human race. 



In addition to possible physiological conditions^ there are certain 

 other factors which may have taken part in the production of the 

 characteristic features of primitive color language. 



On the more special question of the color sense of Homer, I believe 

 that Gladstone and Geiger went too far. The evidence seems to me to 

 suggest one of two possibilities. It is possible that to the Greeks of 

 the time of Homer green and blue were less definite, possibly duller 

 and darker colors than they are to us. It is, however, possible that the 

 language used by Homer was only a relic of an earlier defect of this 

 kind, the defect of nomenclature persisting after the color sense had 

 become completely developed, language lagging behind sense in the 

 race, as it appears to do in the child. According to the latter view, 

 the defective terminology of Homer would be a phenomenon of the 

 same order as the absence of a word for blue in such languages as 

 Welsh, Chinese and Hebrew at the present day. It would not nec- 

 essarily show the actual existence of a defective color sense, but would 

 suggest that at some earlier stage of culture there had been defective 

 sensitiveness for certain colors. 



The evidence derived from poetry and art must always be in some 

 degree unsatisfactory, owing to the great part which convention plays 

 in these productions of the human mind. Still, every convention must 

 have had a starting point, and though, in some cases, it is possible that 

 considerations of technique* may have originated the conventional use 

 of color, it seems more probable that the predominance of red and 

 deficiency of blue, both in the color language and in the decoration of 

 the ancient Greeks, however conventional they may have become, never- 

 theless owe their origin to the special nature of the development of 

 the color sense. 



The subject of the evolution of the color sense in man is one which 

 can only be settled by the convergence to one point of lines of investi- 

 gation which are usually widely separated. The sciences of archceology, 

 philology, psychology and physiology must all be called upon to con- 

 tribute to the elucidation of this problem. I do not wish to do more 

 than reopen the subject, and shall be contented if I have shown that 

 the views of Gladstone and Geiger cannot be contemptuously dismissed 

 as they were twenty years ago. 



* As an instance of the origin of a convention in technique, Mr. Sikes has 

 suggested to me the red figures on Greek vases. Early Greek vases were made 

 of a reddish material, on which the figures were designed in black. At a 

 later time, the vessels were black and the figures red, the conventional per- 

 sistence of red decoration in this case having had its starting-point in the special 

 nature of the makrial originally used in the manufacture of the vases. 



