I20 



NATURE 



{Dec. 12, 1878 



What is really red is on the contrary called by Jenner " pink" 

 in the well-known poem upon tlie signs of wet weather : — 

 " Closed is the //«/i--<j'i?(/ pimpernel." 



To come to the very age we live in, old croquet-players persist 

 in calling the second ball of the series " pink," although for the 

 last ten years it has always been painted red. 



Now if English should become a dead language, what will 

 Eome future critic suppose red to have meant ? a term that he 

 finds applied to blood, to gold, to v.ine, to the marigold, to 

 flame, and to bay horses ; and replaced with]/i«/i' in the case of 

 the pimpernel and the second croquet-ball ? " 



This word meant originally Phoenician, a people from whom 

 the richly-dyed robes that they imported were called ; as in an 

 old poem we have a colour designated from Bristol : — 



' ' Her kirtle Bristol red; " 

 and as a deep blue dye is called "indigo" from being first 

 brought from India. 



The same word (poivi^ was applied to horses, probably Syrian 

 ones in the first place, just as from Rouen we call those of a 

 certain colour "roan," agreeably to a common usage in all 

 languages. Thus porcelain is called " China," and a certain 

 leather made of goats' skin "Morocco," although manufactured 

 in Em-ope. 



As to the term tboivi^ being applied to the lion and the jackal, 

 "we may well suppose that Homer never saw the one or the other. 

 It is quite as unlikely that he ever saw a live dragon. If the 

 horses that the Phoenicians inti-oduced were tawny, it would be 

 no misnomer to call the lion and jackal <poivi^. We are not to 

 presume that if Phoenician robes were crimson, everything else 

 that was named after them must also have been crimson. A 

 future critic might as reasonably argue that porcelain from China 

 was of an orange colour, because there are "China oranges." 



Dates were also called cpo^i/t^ as being a Phoenician fruit, just 

 as the small grapes imported from Corinth are called " currants." 



This term referred, no doubt, to a crimson variety of rose, the 

 so-called Damask rose, the one usually cultivated in ancient 

 times. Thence a comparison of its colour to blood implied by a 

 line of Bion : — 



AifJLa poSov riKT€i t& 5e SaKpva rav dve/xcivay. 



Where this word is applied to oil in the account of the funeral 

 of Patroclus (II. xxiii. 186), it is to a heavenly oil with which 

 Venus anoints the corpse of Hector to preserve it from putrefac- 

 tion, and not ordinary olive oil : — 



^oSoej'Tt 8e X/''**' eKaio} 'Aufipoaiu, 

 It may have meant either "rose-coloured" or "rose-scented." 

 Kvdyfos. 



This term, which seems in so many passages to mean "dark," 

 would have been very properly applied to the sand of volcanic 

 islands, like those in the Egean Sea. On the coast of the Gulf 

 of Naples near Pompeii it is quite black, and walking over it on 

 a hot sunshiny day I had cause to remember its colour, for my 

 feet were roasted. 



XXwpoi, 



Grass in the Mediterranean countries soon withers and dries 

 to a pale colour, and remains so the greater part of the summer. 

 It was to this withered grass that Homer seems to have compared 

 a pale complexion, and honey, and olive wood, and the night- 

 ingale. Our evergreen meadows are unknown in the south. 



The houses of the ancients were unprovided v. ith glass 

 windows, and were very dark within, so that entertainments 

 must have been given by lamp-light, when wine of a dark colour 

 would have appeared darker still. 



Hopcpvpeos. 

 A vague term, but equally vague our purple ; for while we 

 apply it to the foxglove and many other flowers which present 

 an equal mixture of red and blue, we at the same time apply it 

 to a beech, the foliage of which is of a deep copper colour 

 merging into black without any blue in it at all ; and in mil- 

 liners' language to a deep blue without any red in it. 



'Io6iS^y. 

 What was the flower that the Greeks called iov, is very doubt- 

 ful. That which Pindar describes_ (01. vi. 91) as with i<xvQdX% 



Kttl iranir6p<{)vpois SLKr7<n, with brilliant yellow and richly purple 

 rays, cannot be our own modest violet. I have always supposed 

 it to mean Centauries of different species, some of them, as the 

 C. ragusina, of the brightest gold colour, others, as the C. 

 cyatius, of a clear blue, and others of a dark purple. The late 

 J. Hogg in his treatise upon the classical plants of Sicily most 

 unaccountably omits all mention of it. At the present day it is 

 the stock, Matthiola vicana, which in Italy is called Violetta. 

 In the above line quoted from Pindar it must have been a radiate 

 flower that he intended. ' In this respect imcultivated nations 

 are very inaccurate. The lUyrians at the present day call all 

 wild flov.ers alike indiscriminately rosjc, roses ; and \^ e may be 

 sure that Jesus Christ in his beautiful apologue — " Consider the 

 lilies" — used the language of the people he was addressing, and 

 did not mean lilies in the strict sense of the word ; plants that 

 would not burn if cast into an oven on the moiTOw of being cut 

 down. 



It is very strange that Mr. Gladstone in the essay published in 

 the Nineteenth Century of October, 1877, has entirely passed 

 over KpoK6Ki'jr\o?, saffron-robed, an epithet twice applied to Eos, 

 the dawn of day, in the first lines of " II.," bk. 8 and bk. 19, a 

 word that proves that Homer saw yellow distinctly ; for he 

 never calls Eos yellow-fingered, KpoK65aKTv\o?, or rosy-robed, 

 poS6ireTr\os, 



In the above it has been my desire to prove that any inaccuracy 

 in Homer's names of colours was due to the unfixed character of 

 the language, and not to a defective vision on the part of the 

 poet. In illustration of this view let me give a case that occurred 

 to me about two years ago. I took to a flower show at Taunton 

 a dahlia of a rather common variety, and such as most gardeners 

 would call purple ; a dark pink with a shade of blue over it, and 

 requested forty-four different people to write me down what they 

 would call its colour. In their replies I got fourteen different 

 names for it. I sent a flower of the same kind to a lady who 

 returned me twelve replies from members of her family and 

 friends, and in the twelve were eight different names. How 

 much more then may we expect diversity and inaccuracy in the 

 nomenclature of their colours among the popular poets of an 

 early period ! and how little reason have we for believing in any 

 gradual development of colour vision in successive generations of 

 men! K. C. A. Prior 



Colour-Blindness ' 



In answer to Mr. Podmore's question in Nature, vol. xix. 

 p, 73, as to the appearance to me of (the green of the solar 

 spectrum, I may say that such part of it as inclines to yellow is 

 seen by me as faint yellow, and such part of it as inclines to 

 blue is seen by me as faint blue. The line of division, which I 

 may call neutral green, appears simply colourless or white ; 

 there is no dark space, no pigments ; neutral green appears to 

 me gray. 



When I wrote the paper for the Ph'/. Trans. I ajDplied the 

 descriptions to colours obtained by pigments, because tliat was 

 the mode that had previously been adopted in treating the sub- 

 ject, and I had not, at that time, the opportunity of making any 

 good observations on direct light. At a later period I went 

 through a series of experiments of the kind with an eminent 

 physicist, but I am not aware that the results have been pub- 

 lished. I will endeavour, if possible, to supply the desideratum. 



William Pole 



The Colour Sense 

 The note of Mr. Grant Allen in Nature, vol. xix. p. 32, 

 induces me to state that in the year 1877 I arrived at and deve- 

 loped exactly the same conclusions in several articles of the 

 German journal, Kosmos (vol. i. pp. 264-275 and 428-433), 

 namely : — 



1 . The colour-sense manifestly appears already in insects and 

 many of the lowest vertebrates ; its complete absence could 

 therefore hardly be supposed in the very lowest race of men, 



2. The anomalies shown in the expresdons of colours among 

 the most ancient civilised nations by Gladstone, Geiger, and 

 Magnus, may be perfectly explained, partly by the insufficiency ( 

 of the primitive store of words for this subject, partly by climatic, 

 physiological, and optical reasons, as stated at length in the 

 above-mentioned articles. 



3. The usage of telling terms for the single colours closely 

 followed the progress of the art of dyeing. Ernst Krause 



Berlin, December 2 



