OR COLOUR BLINDNESS. 165 
ject he should compare his doctor’s robe, which was of a brilliant 
scarlet, the latter pointed to the trees, and declared that he per- 
ceived no difference between the colour of his dress and that of 
their foliage. 
Goethe * says that he knew two young men under twenty 
years of age whose sight was very good, and who appreciated 
with much delicacy the gradations of light and dark. They saw 
like us the white, black, gray, yellow, and reddish-yellow; they 
called carmine dried in a thick layer red; but they called the 
colour of a thin touch of carmine made with a brush on a white 
shell blue, as well as that of the petals of the rose. They con- 
founded the rose and the blue with violet, and these colours ap- 
peared to be distinguished from one another only by small shades 
of brightness, darkness, of liveliness or faintness. 
Professor Péclet+ mentions two brothers to whom carmine, 
violet and blue seemed identical; they called the colour of the 
peroxide of iron green, and confounded the madder-red of the 
trousers of the troops of the line with the green of the trees. 
In their sight yellow had a great brilliancy. These results were 
obtained by making them determine the different colours with 
which strips of paper had been covered. 
Dr. Sommer has carefully described the peculiarities of his 
daltonism{. In brief, he could not appreciate red and its mix- 
tures, but he distinguished yellow, black, blue and white. His 
brother and three other persons were similarly circumstanced. 
Phrenologists have also paid attention to some cases of dal- 
tonism. Dr. Combe of Edinburgh relates the following details 
of Mr. James Milne, a brass-founder in that city§. His ma- 
ternal grandfather was a daltonian, confounding brown with 
green. His two brothers and Mr. Spankie, his second cousin, 
see like him; whilst his father, mother, maternal uncle and his 
four sisters have a normal organ. Mr. Milne does not distin- 
guish brown from green, blue from rose-colour, the colour of 
grass from that of the orange; purple, indigo and violet appear 
to him only different tints of the same colour. In the rainbow 
he sees distinctly only the yellow and blue; he perceives other 
stripes, but he cannot name them. He calls crimson blue by 
* Zur Farbenlehre, in the chapter Pathologische Farben, §§ 104-113. 
t E. Péclet. Traité Elémentaire de Physique, tome ii. p- 362, 3° edit. 1838. 
t Greefe und Walther’s Journal fiir Chirurgie, Bd. v. Heft 1. p. 135. 
§ Combe’s System of Phrenology. Transactions of the Phrenological So- 
ciety, p. 222, Chambers’s Edinb. Journal, vol. iv. p. 118. 
