368 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



At this point we come across an interesting and once warmly de- 

 bated question. It was maintained some twenty years ago by writers 

 who had been impressed by the defectiveness of the color vocabulary 

 at the short wave-length end of the spectrum, that primitive man 

 generally, and early Hellenic man in particular, were insensitive to the 

 colors at that end of the spectrum, and unable to distinguish them. On 

 investigation of individuals belonging to savage races it appeared, how- 

 ever, that no marked inferiority in color discrimination could be demon- 

 strated. Hence it became clear that the vague and defective vocabulary 

 for blue and green must be due to some other cause than vague and 

 defective perception, and that sensation and nomenclature were not 

 sufficiently parallel to enable us to argue from one to the other. 



That, in the main, is a conclusion which still holds good. In all 

 parts of the world it has been found that color discrimination, even 

 amongst the lowest savages, is far more accurate than color nomencla- 

 ture. Thus of an African Bantu tribe, the Mang'anja, Miss Werner 

 states that they can discriminate all varieties of blue in beads, but call 

 them all black. The sky is black: so is any green, brown or grey article, 

 though a very bright grey counts as white. A^iolet or purple is black. 

 Yellow is either red or white. A word supposed sometimes to mean 

 green really means raw, unripe or even wet. Thus the Mang'anja only 

 have ihree colors — black, white and red. In quite a different region, the 

 Zulus, more advanced in color nomenclature, have not only black, 

 white and red, but a word which may mean either green or blue, and 

 another which means yellow, buff or grey, or some shade of brown. At 

 the same time it now appears that the earlier scientific writers on this 

 subject were not entirely wrong in stating that among savages there is 

 some actual failure of perception at the short wave end of the spectrum, 

 although they were wrong in arguing that it was necessarily involved 

 in the defects of color vocabulary, and in imagining that it could be as 

 extensive as that hypothesis demanded. It now appears that the con- 

 elusions reached by Hugo Magnus of Breslau, as expressed in 1883 in his 

 study 'Ueber Ethnologist-he Untersuchungen ties Farbensinnes,' fairly 

 answer to the facts. In large measure relying on the examination of 

 300 Chukchis made by Almquist during the Nordenskiold Expedition, 

 Magnus concluded that although the color vision of the uncivilized has 

 the same range from red to violet as that of the civilized and all the 

 colors can usually be separately distinguished, there is sometimes a cer- 

 tain dullness, a diminished energy of sensation, as regards green and 

 blue, the shorter and more refrangible waves of the spectrum, while 

 the colors at the other end are perceived with much greater vividness. 

 Stephenson, more recently, among over one thousand Chinese, examined 

 at various places, found only one case of color blindness, but a frequent 

 tendency to confuse green and blue and also blue and purple, while 



