TEE PSYCEOLOGY OF RED. 371 



include yellow. Mrs. Moore found that her baby, between the sixteenth 

 and forty-fifth weeks, nearly always preferred a yellow ball to a red 

 ball; this was doubtless not a matter of color, but of brightness, for 

 there is no reason to suppose chromatic perception at so early an age. 

 Ked, orange and yellow, it may be added, are perceived by a slightly 

 lower illumination than green, blue and violet, the last being the most 

 difficult of all to perceive, so that it is not surprising that the colors at 

 the violet end should be inconspicuous to young infants. Garbini, 

 whose experiments are worth noting in more detail, found that the 

 order of perception is red, green, yellow, orange, blue and violet, and 

 as he experimented with a large number of children and used methods 

 which so competent a judge as Binet regards as approaching perfection, 

 his results may be considered a fair approach to the truth. He found 

 that for the first few days after birth the infant shuns the light; then, 

 about the fourteenth day, he ceases to be photophobic and begins to en- 

 joy the light, as is shown by his being quieted when brought into a 

 bright light and crying when taken from it; this may sometimes begin 

 even about the fifth day. Between the fifth week and the eighteenth 

 month children show signs of distinguishing white, black and grey ob- 

 jects. It is not until after the eighteenth month that their chromatic 

 perception begins, any preference for red and yellow objects at an 

 earlier age being due merely to their greater luminosity. Garbini con- 

 siders that it is the center of the retina, or the portion most sensitive 

 to red and yellow, which is most exercised in young infants. Between 

 the second and third years children, both boys and girls, were found 

 to be most successful in the recognition of red, then of green, but they 

 very often confused orange with red, and mixed up yellow, blue, violet 

 and green; he thinks they tend to confuse a color with the preceding 

 color in spectral order. Under the age of three children may be said to 

 be color-blind, and they are liable to confuse rosy tints with green. Be- 

 tween the ages of three and five they are able to distinguish red in any 

 gradation, green nearly always, with an occasional confusion with red, 

 while yellow is sometimes confused with orange, orange sometimes 

 replaced by rose, blue often not recognized in its gradations, and violet 

 often selected in place of blue. At this age, also (as in hysterical anaes- 

 thesia of the retina), blue seems dark or black. In the fifth and sixth 

 years red, green and yellow are always correctly chosen; orange gra- 

 dations are not always recognized, and blue and violet come last, being 

 sometimes confused. In the sixth year children are perfecting their 

 knowledge of orange, blue and violet and completing their knowledge of 

 color designations. Garbini has reached the important result that 

 color perceptions an.d verbal expression of the perceptions follow ex- 

 actly parallel paths, so that in studying verbal expression we are really 

 studying perception, with the important distinction that the expression 



