PHENOMENA OF LIGHT AND COLOUR. 69 



Another method of producing various colours, Aristotle 

 says, is by laying on a coat of a bright colour and then 

 laying over this a coat of a different and duller colour, 

 so that the bright colour shines through the other. A modi 

 fication of this method to which he refers is the production 

 of a red colour when the sun shines through mist or smoke.* 

 He speaks also of painters being in the habit of obtaining 

 some colours by mixing paints, but says that they could not 

 thus obtain red, greenish yellow, or blue, and that these 

 were almost the only ones they could not obtain in this 

 way.t It has been explained in Chapter iii. that this 

 passage suggests that Aristotle probably considered the 

 intermediate colour (wpswvov) of the rainbow to be some 

 shade of yellow rather than green. 



However unimportant Aristotle s work on the nature and 

 production of colour effects may be considered to be, it must 

 be conceded that he incidentally gives information which 

 materially assists in the identification of many ancient Greek 

 names for colours with the modern names of the colours 

 they were intended to denote. In Homeric and even later 

 times the common ideas about colours were not separated 

 from those about brightness, or, in the case of colours of the 

 eyes, vivacity, and there do not appear to have been many 

 colour-names in use. It will be seen, however, that Aristotle 

 used many colour-names, most of which denoted well-defined 

 colours, but, like many other Greek writers, he sometimes 

 employed the words /c*&av and MVXOV respectively to indicate 

 merely that an object was dark and bright or light. The 

 four colours of the rainbow mentioned by him have been 

 referred to many times already. A deep brownish red 

 colour, like that of the eggs of the kestrel, is called eputyov. I 

 The ash colour or bluish grey of the crane is reppov ; while 

 the somewhat lighter tint of many gulls is aw3b3&.|| The 

 deep and brilliant blues and greens of the kingfisher were 

 Kvavouv and tfwpov respectively. IT 



In his description of the colours of the iris, in H. A. i. 

 c. 8, s. 4, Aristotle uses the words p&av, aiyewov, yhavxov, and 

 Xapowov to denote the colours. It is difficult to determine 

 what these were intended to be. The usual colour of a 

 goat s iris is brownish or yellowish, and this is probably the 

 colour aiyuwv. MeAav refers to the darkest colours of the 



:;: De Sensu, d-c., iii. 440&. f Meteorol. iii. c. 2, s. 5. 



I H. A. vi. c. 2, s. 2. Ibid. iii. c. 10, s. 11. 



|| Ibid. viii. c. 5, s. 7. ^T Ibid. ix. c. 15, s. 1. 



