POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



573 



Sonic Peculiarities of Color-Bliuducss. 



Mr. R. Brudenel Carter defines color- 

 blindness, in his Cantor Lectures on that 

 subject, as incapacity on the part of the 

 nerves of vision to respond to the stimulus 

 which one of the three kinds of light is cal- 

 culated to produce. It will help us to real- 

 ize the nature of the defect to assume, which 

 is not quite the case, that white light is com- 

 posed of red, green, and violet in equal pro- 

 portions and of equal luminosity ; then to 

 eyes which are incapable of seeing one of 

 the colors, one third of the illumination of 

 natural objects is extinguished, and the ap- 

 pearance the objects present is not that of 

 their real color, but only of that fraction of 

 their real color in which the two visible 

 colors are combined in them. White is not 

 white to the color-blind, but a mixture of 

 green and violet to the red-blind, of red and 

 violet to the green-blind, and so through the 

 other shades and the other varieties of color- 

 blindness. It is impossible to obtain an 

 exact idea of what the color-blind see, ex- 

 cept a person be examined who has one eye 

 normal-sighted while the other eye is de- 

 fective. Professor Holmgren has examined 

 two such persons, one of whom was red-blind, 

 the other violet-blind in one eye, with re- 

 sults tending to confirm what had been pre- 

 dicted on the subject in accordance with the 

 Young -Helrnholtz theory. The mistakes 

 made by the color-blind in daily life are 

 much less numerous and less remarkable 

 than might have been supposed; so much 

 so, that the recently acquired knowledge of 

 the great prevalence of the condition has 

 come as a great surprise to most of the 

 world ; and persons may live for years hav- 

 ing the defect without knowing it till the 

 fact is revealed by some unexpected test 

 being applied in an unusual manner. The 

 color-blind are seldom fully insensible to 

 differences in the colors between which they 

 can not distinguish critically. They learn by 

 habit to perceive differences in the appear- 

 ance of objects which are called by differ- 

 ent color-names difference it may be in 

 shade, or in intensity of light which they 

 learn to associate with the color-names, and 

 will so escape being caught. Men on rail- 

 roads may thus learn to distinguish red 

 from green lights by one of them being 

 bright and the other dim, and may go for a 



long time without being found out. Their 

 defect, however, will some day expose them, 

 probably when they are least suspicious of 

 its influence. It has been remarked that 

 color-blind men regularly eliminate them- 

 selves from railway-service in the course of 

 a few years, by a kind of unintelligent selec- 

 tion, so that they are never found among 

 the old servants of any company. They get 

 discharged for carelessness, or for drunken- 

 ness, for accidents which were really owing 

 to color-blindness. It is evident from these 

 considerations that no test of the color-sense 

 can be wholly satisfactory that depends on 

 calling the colors by their right names, for 

 that becomes a matter of habit not one 

 that depends on the exhibition of differently 

 colored lights, for the blindest know a dif- 

 ference, although not the difference, between 

 them. Holmgren's variously colored worst- 

 eds, of about a hundred and fifty shades, 

 which candidates are required to assort and 

 match, afford the most satisfactory and a 

 nearly perfect test. 



Cat-Lore. The origin of domestic cats 

 is obscure, but seems by all accounts to fall 

 somewhere within historic times. All the 

 histories of ancient nations seem to go back 

 to a time when they had no cats. M. Le- 

 normant says that a wild cat was hunted 

 and eaten by the Swiss lake-dwellers in the 

 age of stone ; but Africa, south of Egypt, 

 appears to have been the cradle of the cat 

 as a domesticated animal. Pussy appears 

 in the middle-empire Egyptian monuments 

 in the character of a retriever seated in 

 the boat of the wild-fowl hunter, a circum- 

 stance indicating that those people had 

 a strain that did not have as unconquer- 

 able an aversion to the water as our cats ; 

 and there have been cats, even in mod- 

 ern times, that could bring themselves up 

 to diving after fish. The cat, like every- 

 thing else, whether agreeable or horrible, 

 was raised to the odor of sanctity in Egypt 

 and became the emblem of the goddess 

 Pasht, the Egyptian Diana. M. Lenormant 

 believes, however, that this worship was 

 comparatively late, and finds no trace of the 

 animal among the monuments of the an- 

 cient empire. Under the earlier dynasties, 

 Pasht was a lioness-goddess, and not till 

 the twelfth dynasty, and the conquests in 



