Cotenso.—On the Colour Sense of the Maoris. 481 
Papuas. The sky was blue in the days of the Vedic poets, of the Zoroas- 
trian worshippers, of the Hebrew prophet, of the Homeric singers, but 
though they saw it they knew it not by name; they had no name for that 
which is the sky’s own peculiar tint, the sky-blue.”—/ Lectures at the Charter 
House, 1878 : Lecrure I). 
“Tt is noteworthy down to what a late period both the Greeks and the 
Romans still confounded blue and violet, especially with grey and brown. 
Even long after scientific observation had separated these colours they seem 
to have been mixed up together in popular conception. And thus it hap- 
pened that Theocritus, and, in imitation of him, Virgil, by way of excuse 
for the bronzed hue of a beautiful face, could still say, ‘‘ Are not the violets, 
too, and the hyacinths black?’ With a similar intention Virgil says : 
“The white privets fall; it is the black hyacinths which are sought after 
and loved.” Nay, even Cassiodorus, at the beginning of the sixth century 
after Christ, gives an account of the four colours employed in the 
Cireensian Games, which, as is well known, sometimes acquired a fatal 
significance : green had been dedicated to spring, red to summer, white, on 
account of the hoar-frost, to autumn, blue to the cloudy winter—venetus nubile 
hiemi. Classical antiquity, in fact, possessed no word for pure blue. * * * 
The Romanic languages found indeed no fit word for blue in the original 
Roman tongue, and were obliged partly to borrow it from the German. 
Thus, among others, the French bleu and the older Italian biavo, are, as is 
well known, borrowed from the German dlaw, which, in its turn, in the 
earliest time signified black.” —/ Gieger, loc. cit. ) 
I have been at the trouble of bringing forward all this first-class autho- 
tity evidence, to show—(1) that “the highest races” did not possess 
“the entire scale of colours ;”—(2) that had the Maoris not been already 
in possession of the knowledge of colours, and of their shades and hues, 
“the arrival of Europeans” among them would not suddenly have “‘ re- 
vealed” such to them ;—and (3) that such a wholesale mental revolution, 
as Mr. Stack here states, has never, and could never take place ‘‘all 
at once,” : 
I feel, however, that I must specially notice two or three more of Mr. 
_ Btack’s statements. ee * 
He says (p. 155)—‘ Kura (red) is used very often instead of whero to 
