THE COLOUR VISION OF PRIMITIVE RACES 151 



endless variety of tones, shades and shapes, many of which call for 

 the exercise of discriminatory perception, the widespread blue surfaces 

 of sky and sea are commonly of uniform tone, and in hardly any circum- 

 stances is the discrimination of blue tones of practical importance to 

 men of the lower cultures. 



The Egyptian peasants examined by Rivers w^ere, however, well 

 acquainted with blue objects and many were wearing blue garments. 

 McDougall attaches much importance to the undoubted greater affective 

 value of warm colours as compared with cold tones, and holds that 

 this factor, rather than defective sensibility for blue and violet, explains 

 the defects in nomenclature and in colour matching. He suggests the 

 view that primitive vision corresponded to our sense of grey, that our 

 senses for blue and yellow became differentiated as the affections 

 produced by the light of the two ends of the spectrum, and that at a 

 later period the senses of red and green became differentiated in a similar 

 way from the sense of yellow. The facts of colour-blindness and the 

 distribution of colour-sense in the periphery of the retina (as generally 

 accepted) fit well with this scheme of development. 



Myers^ holds that " language affords no safe clue to sensibility. 

 A colour name occurs when it is needful. Where it is needless, it 

 will not be formed, be the sensibility to that colour ever so great. If 

 we are to gauge the colour sense of a people by colour nomenclature, 

 nearly every primitive people must be dubbed ' brown-blind ' or 

 ' brown- weak,' inasmuch as it is very rare to find a special word for 

 brown. 



" The ' red-blindness,' which occurs among the colour-blind, and in 

 the intermediate zone of the normal retina, is strong evidence against 

 the view that red is the first colour-sensation phylogenetically acquired. 

 The one prominent fact, which stands out clearly in this discussion, is 

 that both primitive peoples and infants are attracted most by red and 

 next by yellow ; this fact. being manifest among the former in their 

 nomenclature and among the latter by their readiness to grasp objects 

 of these colours. I suggest that this superior attractiveness of red is a 

 fundamental characteristic far too deeply and immutably ingrained to 

 be attributable, as McDougall so ingeniously suggests, to the greater 

 utility or rareness of red and yellow objects or to the relative unattrac- 

 tiveness of the broad surrounding expanse of uniformly blue sky, blue- 

 green sea and green foliage. The excitatory action of red is manifest 

 in organisms lower than man." 



1 Brit. J I. of Psychol, u. 361, 1908. 



