THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RED. 521 



delusions of persecution became quite rational and was even in a con- 

 dition to be sent home after a few days in the same room. He also 

 found that a violent maniac wearing a strait jacket, after a few hours 

 in a room with blue glass windows became quite calm and gave no fur- 

 ther trouble. Osburne has found, after many years' experience, that in 

 the absence of structural disease violet light (for from three to six 

 hours) is most useful in the treatment of excitement, sleeplessness and 

 acute mania; red he has found of some benefit, though to a much less 

 degree in such cases (it must be remarked that violet light as usually 

 applied is not free from red), while he has not found any color with 

 which he has tried experiments (red, orange or violet) of benefit in 

 melancholia. The significance of these facts is not altogether clear; 

 the influence, as Pritchard Davies concluded, seems to be largely moral, 

 though it may be that the colors of long wave-length are tonic and 

 those of short wave-length sedative. 



So far I have been chiefly concerned to point out that the immense 

 emotional impressiveness of red has a basis in physical laws, being by 

 no means altogether a matter of environmental associations. It is true 

 that the two groups of influences overlap, and that we can not always 

 distinguish them. We can not be sure that the greater sensitiveness to 

 the red rays may not have been emphasized in the organism, not neces- 

 sarily as the result of inherited acquirement, but probably as the per- 

 petuation of a variation of sensibility, found beneficial in an environ- 

 ment where red was liable to be especially associated with objects that 

 were to be avoided as terrible or sought as useful. In this way the 

 physical and environmental factors would run in a circle. 



We have to bear this consideration in mind when we take into ac- 

 count the susceptibilities of animals, especially of the higher animals, to 

 red. The color sense, it is well known, is widely diffused among ani- 

 mals; indeed this fact has been brought forward, especially by Pouchet, 

 to prove that there can have been no color evolution in man; this it 

 can scarcely be said to show, since evolution does not run in a straight 

 line, and it is quite conceivable and even probable that the ancestors 

 of man were less dependent than many lower animals, for the means 

 of living, on a highly developed color sense. Thus a color sense that 

 among some creatures is so highly developed as to include even the 

 ultra-violet rays, was among our own ape-like ancestors either never 

 developed or partially lost. 



Graber, in his important investigation into the color sense of ani- 

 mals, showed that of fifty animals studied by him forty showed strong 

 color preferences in their places of abode. In general he found, without 

 being able to explain the fact, that animals which prefer the dark are 

 red lovers, those which prefer the light are blue lovers. The common 

 worm, with head and tail cut off, still preferred red to blue nearly aa 



