Nagel, Color-Sense of a Child. 223 



other colors, but had named neither that color nor the colors 

 brown and yellow. 



On the ninth day of the tests, three days after his recognition 

 of blue, green, black and white, and one day after he had recog- 

 nized gray, I showed the child some lively violets among the others 

 and said to him, "that is 'lilla.'" He at once took up the term 

 with great enthusiasm, and showed me other "hllas," among them 

 a very dark one. Here, too, the color sense of the child proved 

 to be much superior to dichromatic color vision since I (deu- 

 teranope), as well as the other type of dichromate (the protanope), 

 cannot with certainty distinguish violet from a somewhat unsatur- 

 ated blue. 



A marked difference from his behavior toward blue, which per- 

 sisted throughout the days following, was that the designation 

 "lilla" was used with evident pleasure and without any hesitation. 

 On the other hand, the limits of the concept lilla were obviously 

 not so sharply drawn as those of "red" or "green," nor even that 

 of the unloved "blue." After the child could correctly pick out 

 violet, he designated, likewise as "lilla," not infrequently a bril- 

 liant purple (from the colored papers of Rothe), and, less fre- 

 quently, a pure ultramarine blue. If I then immediately after- 

 ward showed him the same blue and asked, "is that 'hlla'".'' I 

 received invariably as answer an almost indignant "no! that's 

 not lilla." 



With the other colors, when the child was not tired, such con- 

 fusion did not, as I have already mentioned, occur; it occurred 

 only when he was tired or noticeably inattentive. I had the 

 impression, with regard to violet, that the difference between it 

 and blue or purple was not quite surely recognized, or, that the 

 difference, as one might say, was not as great as that between red 

 and green or green and blue. 



On the same day that the child had learned violet I pointed to 

 yellow, tor the first time, and named it for him. My questioning 

 showed, the next day, that he had retained the term; nor did he 

 ever forget it during the remaining days of the investigation, often 

 using it quite spontaneously. Yet, and that seems to me note- 

 worthy, the term "white" disappeared simultaneously from his 

 vocabulary of spontaneously employed words. It seemed, as it 

 were, to have been crowded out by the term "yellow." Never- 

 theless, confusion between white and yellow seldom occurred, and 



