On the color description of flowers. 
J. H. PILLSBURY. 
In no respect is the description of a plant more often doubt- 
ful than in the color assigned to the flowers, especially if any 
trace of violet be present in the coloring. It is not at all 
uncommon to hear some one, reading the description of a 
flower, exclaim regarding the color, ‘‘that is wrong.” During 
the past ten years I have noted with much interest the differ- 
ent expressions used by students in my classes to describe the 
color of some of our most common wild flowers. Asarule, Ihave 
found that young ladies are much more explicit in their de- 
scription of the color of a flower than the young men of equal 
intellectual advancement. This is probably not due to a 
keener color sense, but to the possession of a fuller vocabulary 
of color terms. In consequence of this fuller vocabulary, the 
young lady seeks to express smaller differences of color. I 
have not found, however, that she is more accurate in her 
description of the color in question. Indeed, it has often 
seemed to me that the smaller vocabulary has led to a more 
careful discrimination and a more correct discernment of the 
components of the color. What we most need is not a fuller 
vocabulary but a more accurate use of the vocabulary we now 
possess. It is no doubt a fact that an occasional source of 
_ confusion in the description of floral color is a more or less 
feeble sense in regard to some one color. But this difficulty 
can not be of sufficiently frequent occurrence to be a serious 
source of confusion. The percentage of persons who are 
either color blind or possess only a feeble sense for some one 
color is so small that there is certainly likely to arise no very 
frequent trouble from such a source. 
€ confusion of color description arises mainly from two 
clearly discernible sources both of which, it seems to me, we 
may reasonably hope to be able to remove. 
he first of these sources needs hardly more than the mere 
mention to be recognized by every botanist. I refer to the 
fact that we have absolutely no recognized standards of color, 
and no generally accepted plan of color nomenclature. To 
Say nothing of the conflicting theories of color which are still 
iN vogue, each of which has its adherents, nearly every writer 
