BY JOHN THOMSON, M.B. 49 



APPENDIX I. 



That extraordinary man, the late Mr. W. E. Gladstone, in 

 an article in Vol. 2 of the " Nineteenth Century " for 1877 dealt 

 with the colour sense of 



" The Blind Old Man of Scio's Rocky Isle." 

 and his conclusions were, " that Homer's system of colour or 

 rather his system in lieu of colour was founded upon light and 

 upon darkness, its opposite or negative : and that the organ of 

 colour was but partially developed among the Greeks of his age." 

 And " that although Homer has used light in its various forms 

 for his purposes with perhaps greater splendour and effect than 

 any other poet, yet the colour adjectives and colour descriptions 

 of the poems were not only imperfect but highly ambiguous and 

 confused." In a learned, classical, and logical fashion he criti- 

 cally analyses the various uses of the words — eruthros, xanthos, 

 chloros, kuaneos, porphureos and others, and suggests that 

 Homer had a partial recognition of the extremes of the spectrum 

 in that he had discovered an affinity between what lies next to 

 light, viz., red and orange — eruthros and xanthos — and what 

 lies next at the other end of the scale to not-light, viz., violet, 

 porphureos : recognising red and orange at the one end and 

 violet at the other, but failing in the yellows, greens and blues. 

 In a very interesting letter I received from Mr. R. H. Roe, 

 head master of our Grammar School, he says " There can be 

 no certainty that Homer was blind, because the best modern 

 critics are about equally divided whether there was a single poet 

 Homer at all ; but there is no doubt that the ancient sculptors 

 represented their Homer as blind, and that ancient historians 

 and poets spoke of him as blind. In the Homeric hymn quoted 

 by Thucydides (Bk. iii., cap. 104) appears — 



TVfjjXos oivrjp, oIk€l Se Xt'o) 'eVi 7ranra\oe(T(rrj 

 (" A blind man, he dwells in rocky Chios,") 



which line Thucydides considers evidently to be written by 

 Homer himself ; and upon it is based the popular belief of 

 antiquity about the poet's blindness. Still I presume that even 

 the ancients only considered him blind in mature or late life, for 

 otherwise he could not have described the scenes of nature with 

 such an artist's eye as he has done. The words which in my 

 reading of Homer I have always found used in the most in- 

 definite way are kuaneos, xanthos and glaukos, though eruthros 

 and porphureos are very loosely used also. You will find in a 



