680 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXII. No. 569. 



roborate the conclusion reached by the method 

 of basket cultures. 



To test this proposition still further, the 

 baskets of untreated soil used in the first 

 fertilizer test were replanted and the plants 

 allowed to grow three weeks. The result 

 showed the soil to have improved to the extent 

 of about 183 per cent, by transpiration and 

 86 per cent, by green weight. This observa- 

 . tion suggested that possibly the plants of the 

 first planting had absorbed from the soil suf- 

 ficient salts to reduce the concentration of the 

 soil solution to a considerable degree, although 

 the plants had made but a poor growth, and 

 that in this way the injurious property of the 

 original sample had been largely corrected. 

 At the end of this second culture the soil was 

 again subjected to a chemical analysis of its 

 water extract, with results which showed 

 clearly that the above explanation is the cor- 

 rect one. The following amounts of dissolved 

 materials, expressed as before in parts per 

 million of air dry soil, were found: ISTOg, 87; 

 P0„ trace; K, 29; Ca, 4; and CI, 100. It is 

 obvious that a marked decrease in dissolved 

 salts has indeed taken place. 



While the last test was in progress basket 

 cultures were carried on with three new 

 samples of this soil from other spots in the 

 same field, these having been obtained in 

 order to determine whether or not the first 

 sample was typical of the whole field. The 

 average growth in the three new samples was 

 very much better than that in the first plant- 

 ing of the original samples, the difl^erence 

 amounting to 322 per cent, by transpiration 

 and 110 per cent, by green weight. Thus it 

 became apparent that the original soil sample 

 was not typical of the field from which it was 

 taken and that in general the field is not un- 

 productive. 



It appears then that the particular spot 

 from which the original sample was taken has 

 in some way, possibly by over-fertilization, 

 too high a soluble salt content for good plant 

 growth. 



Frank D. Gardner. 



BuB^AU OF Soils, 



U. S. Department of Agriculture, 

 Washington, D. C. 



observations on color perception among the 

 visayans of leyte island, p. I. 



As a United States government teacher in 

 the public schools of Leyte Island, I became 

 interested in the dialect of the Yisayans. In 

 this study I found frequently suggested what 

 sort of men the Visayans were when the 

 Spaniards came to their islands. The modified 

 Spanish words in the' vocabulary of the present 

 native designate ideas given to the Visayans 

 by the Spaniards. It was not long before I 

 was confronted with the same question that 

 Gladstone encountered in his study of Greek. 

 Gladstone by pointing out that in the Homeric 

 vocabulary there were no words for blue, and 

 by concluding that, in the time of Hoiner the 

 Greeks did not see blue, opened quite a con- 

 troversy over the evolution of color perception 

 as based upon the nomenclatures of ancient 

 people and savages of the present. Geiger ad- 

 vanced the theory that red was the first color 

 seen by man and after that the other colors 

 in their order as formed by the spectrum. 

 Geiger was supported by Magnus with fur- 

 ther philological evidence. This discussion 

 until recently had been considered closed. 

 Havelock Ellis in Vol. 69 of The Coniem- 

 porary Review at page 715 says : " There is no 

 doubt whatever that all races of men, concern- 

 ing whom any evidence can be obtained, have 

 been acquainted with the same regions of the 

 spectrum we have known." After so strong a 

 statement I was surprised to find Rivers, who 

 had made extensive experiments upon the 

 Papuans of Torres Straits, saying of his work 

 that one of its chief interests ' is that it shows 

 a defect in nomenclature for a color may be 

 associated with defective sensibility for that 

 color and so far lends support to the views 

 of Gladstone and Geiger.' ^ The evidence that 

 I have obtained among the Visayans also sup- 

 ports the views of Gladstone and Geiger. My 

 discovery that the people- had no words for the 

 colors higher than yellow was new to me, but 

 I later learned that this fact was known as 

 early as 1869. Words for the higher colors 

 which are used to-day by the natives are bor- 



^ ' Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological 

 Expedition,' Cambridge, 1901, Vol. II., Part I., 

 p. 49. 



