SIGHT AND SEEING IN ANCIENT TIMES 421 



chromatuphlosis. However, technical terms often lead the philologist 

 to express the same opinion of them that the devil is said to have used 

 of the Ten Commandments, " They are a queer lot." In the language 

 of the Psalmist, " They are fearfully and wonderfully made." Gen- 

 erally speaking, animals make less use of sight than man; all those 

 that have been domesticated select their food by the sense of smell and 

 not by sight. The test may be readily made with blind horses, which 

 are unfortunately not as rare as they ought to be. Birds, on the other 

 hand, depend wholly on the sense of sight, which is remarkably acute. 1 

 In ancient accounts of battles, sieges and pestilence, those gruesome 

 birds that live on corpses are never absent. It may be taken for 

 granted that the problem, How do we see? exercised the ingenuity of 

 the ancient thinkers a great deal. It need not surprise us that they 

 were wide of the mark, seeing that there is as yet no universally 

 accepted theory of vision. But the moderns have learned that color 

 is subjective, whereas the ancients regarded it as objective. Lucretius, 

 who follows the teachings of some of the Greek philosophers, probably 

 of Empedocles, affirms that very thin films are detached from the 

 visible object and impinge upon the eye to produce sight. Aristotle 

 was convinced that there must be some medium between the organ of 

 sight and the object seen by which the sight-process is mediated. 

 Lucretius says that persons afflicted with jaundice see everything 

 yellow because so many atoms of that color fill the orb of sight. He 

 compares the casting away of films or effigies to the cicada that casts 

 off its tunic, or the snake that sheds its glossy vesture and to fire that 

 emits smoke. Much later Locke says : " Since the extension, figure, 

 number and motion of bodies of an observable bigness may be perceived 

 at a distance by the sight, it is evident that some singly imperceptible 

 bodies must come from them to the eye." Lucretius seems to have 

 observed natural phenomena with unusual care for a Soman, but it 

 was rather their more violent aspects, such as thunder and lightning, 

 earthquakes and waterspouts and floods. The phenomena of rain, hail 

 and snow could of course not escape his attention. It has been shown 

 above that the ancients, particularly the Greeks, had a very defective 

 perception of colors and that they had very poor eyes for the beauties 

 of nature as displayed in scenery. It may be interesting to trace briefly 

 the growth of this last sentiment, since it is one of the latest phases 

 of evolution. The Greeks were eminently a social people. They laid 



1 1 recently came across the following — how much truth there is in it I 

 do not know: " Red will annoy a turkey-cock as much as a bull, but a sparrow 

 will not let it disturb its mind. But if one shakes a blue rag in front of a 

 caged sparrow's eyes, he will go frantic with disgust. Sparrows, and linnets 

 too, will refuse food offered to them on a piece of blue paper, and dislike the 

 appearance of any one wearing a blue dress. Medium light blue affects them 

 most, but blue serge they scarcely mind at all. Thrushes and blackbirds object 

 to yellow, but will use red or blue dried grasses left about their haunts to 

 build the outer layers of their nests. Yellow grasses they let alone." 



