3 
; 
= 
; 
: 
aa 
. 
if 
Cotenso.—On the Colour Sense of the Maoris. 479 
lations and comments:—‘‘ Kimchi explains tepaylét by blew; Abarbanel 
translates, silk ; Ebn Exra, Rashi, and others, yellow; and Luther, yellow 
silk; others, indigo—(but saxwOoc is not exclusively blue),” ete., ete. (Dr. 
Kalisch, in loc.) 
Mr. Stack further says (p. 154),—‘‘The Maoris appear to have reached 
the third stage of colour-sense development, when, all at once, the arrival of 
Europeans revealed to them the entire scale of colours possessed by the highest 
races of mankind.” 
Mr. Stack will find that in the earliest mental productions that are 
preserved to us of the various peoples of the earth the colour blue is not 
mentioned at all. 
“Let me first mention the wonderful, youthfully fresh hymns of the 
Rigveda, consisting of more than 10,000 lines; these are nearly all filled 
with descriptions of the sky. Scarcely any other subject is more frequently 
mentioned ; the variety of hues which the sun and dawn daily display in 
it—day and night, clouds and lightnings, the atmosphere and the ether,— 
all these are with inexhaustible abundance exhibited to us again and again © 
in all their magnificence; only the fact that the sky is blue could: never have 
been gathered from these poems. * * * The Veda hymns represent the 
earliest stage of the human mind that has been preserved in any literature ; 
but as regards the blue colour, the same observation may be made of the 
Zendavesta, the books of the Parsees, to whom, as is well known, light and 
fire, both the terrestrial and heavenly, are most sacred, and of whom one 
may expect an attention to the thousand-fold hues of the sky similar to that 
inthe Vedas. The Bible, in which, as is equally well known, the sky or 
heaven plays no less a part, seeing that it occurs in the very first verse, and 
in upwards of 430 other passages besides, quite apart from synonymous 
s, such as ether, ete., yet finds no opportunity either of mention- 
_ ing the blue eolour. * * * The Koran does not know the blue colour either, 
however much it speaks of the heavens. Nor is the blue sky mentioned in 
_ the Edda hymns. * * * Nay, even in the Homeric Poems the blue shy i is 
Not mentioned, although in the regions where they originat 
such a special charm on every visitor. * * * The ten ks ok Hecate 
hymns, though they frequently mention the earth, no more bestow on it 
the epithet green than on the heavens that of blue. They speak of trees, 
herbs, and fodder-grass, of ripe branches, lovely fruit, food-yielding moun- 
: _ ne, of sowing and ploughing, but never of — ee cela 
eke pa MEE y Rendarenin: 
5 call Tis i is , kewise a cloud, Ss pen : 
