, 4 o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Apart, however, from whether certain colours are favourites 

 or not, some few persons have the consciousness of a colour 

 more or less present with them. Thus R. L. Stevenson had, 

 so he tells us, a feeling of brown which, during his attacks 

 of fever, was unusually distinct. It was "a peculiar shade of 

 brown, something like sealskin." 



As might be expected, so acute an observer as Mr. Rudyard 

 Kipling has not failed to notice coloured thinking. In his very 

 curious story "They "(52) he describes the colour concepts ex- 

 perienced by a blind old lady, who opens an interview by com- 

 plaining that certain colours — purple and black — hurt her. Her 

 visitor asks, " And what are the colours at the top of whatever 

 you see " ? "I see them so," she replies, " white, green, yellow, 

 red, purple ; and when people are very bad, black across the 

 red, as you were just now." The old lady goes on to say that 

 ever since she was quite a child some colours hurt her, and 

 some made her happy. " I only found out afterwards that 

 other people did not see the colours." So unfamiliar is coloured 

 thinking to the ordinary person that a critic wrote {The Academy 

 and Literature, October 8, 1904), " Such tales as ' They' are sheer 

 conundrums." Another writer asked more pertinently, " Are 

 the colours the blind woman described the colours of different 

 thoughts?" 



In Mrs. Felkin's novel In Subjection (43) (1900) the heroine, 

 Isabel Seton, is evidently a coloured thinker. Some of her 

 colour associations are given on page 149. The novelist, in a 

 letter to the writer, was good enough to explain that these 

 experiences of her heroine are based on those of an actual 

 prototype, some of whose additional psychochromes she 

 kindly mentioned. Isabel Seton has synaesthesia also, for the 

 actual sounds of voices call up colours. Thus, soprano voices 

 are to her pale blue or green or yellow or white, contraltos are 

 pink or red or violet, tenors are different shades of brown, 

 while basses are black or dark green or navy blue. 



In the novel Christopher, by Richard Pryce(6i), there is an 

 interesting allusion to a boy who is described as not morbid, 

 although he is evidently a synaesthete and a coloured thinker. 

 He talks of playing the sunset on the piano (a colour-phonism), 

 and of smelling moonlight (a light-olfaction). In a novel, 

 Youth's Encounter (64), published only last year (1913), we are 

 told that to one of the characters " Monday was dull red, 



