THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RED. 369 



Dr. Adele Fielde, of Swatow, China, among 1,200 Chinese of both 

 sexes examined by Thomson's wool test, found that more than half 

 mixed up green and blue, and many even seemed to be quite blind to 

 violet. Ernest Krause also has argued that primitive man was most 

 sensitive to the red end of the spectrum, hence setting about to obtain 

 red pigments and acquiring definite names for them, an explanation 

 which is accepted by Karl von den Steinen to account for the phe- 

 nomena among the Central Brazilians. The recent investigations of 

 Eivers at Torres Straits have confirmed the conclusions of Magnus. He 

 found that, corresponding to the defect of color terminology, though 

 to a much less degree, there appeared to be an actual defect of vision 

 for colors of short wave-length; in testing with colored wools no mis- 

 take was ever made with reds, but blues and greens were constantly 

 confused, as were blue and violet. 



It may even be argued that the same defect exists to a minor degree 

 not only among the peoples of Eastern Asia whose aesthetic sense 

 is highly developed, but among civilized Europeans when any kind 

 of color blindness is altogether excluded. This was noted long since 

 by Holmgren, who remarked that some persons, though able to dis- 

 tinguish between blue and green wools when placed together, were 

 liable to call the blue wool green, and the green blue, when they saw 

 them separately. Magnus also showed that such an inability is apt to 

 appear at a very early stage in some persons when the illumination is 

 diminished, although the perception of red and yellow remains per- 

 fectly distinct. He further showed that blue and green at certain 

 distances are often much more difficult to recognize than red. Most 

 people probably are conscious of difficulty in distinguishing blue and 

 green pigments with diminished light and find that blue easily passes 

 into black. Violet also appears for many people to be merely a variety 

 of blue; the word itself, we may note, is recent in our language, and 

 plays a very small part in our poetic literature, and in fact the color 

 itself, if we rigidly exclude purple, is extremely rare in nature. It is a 

 noteworthy fact in this connection that in normal persons the color 

 sense may be easily educated; this is not merely a fact of daily observa- 

 tion, but has been exactly demonstrated by Fere, who by means of his 

 chromoptoscopic boxes, containing very dilute colored solutions, found 

 that with practice it was possible to recognize solutions which had 

 previously seemed uncolored. It is also noteworthy that in the achro- 

 matopsia of the hysterical, as Charcot showed and as Parimand has 

 since confirmed, the order in which the colors usually disappear is violet, 

 green, blue, red; sometimes the paradoxical fact is found that red will 

 give a luminous sensation in a contracted visual field when even white 

 gives no luminous sensation. This persistence of red vision in the hys- 

 terical is only one instance of a predilection for red which has often been 



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