CoLENso, — On the Colour Sense of the Maoris. 479 



lations and comments: — " Kimelii explains tej)mjlet by hleu; Abarbanel 

 translates, silk ; Ebn Exra, Easlii, and others, yelloiv ; and Luther, yelloiv 

 silk; others, indigo — (but vaKLvQoQ is not exclusively blue)," etc., etc, (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 eiitire 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 

 Eigveda, 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 

 in the 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 

 expressions, such as ether, etc., yet finds no opportunity either of mention- 

 ing the blue colour. ■'• * * 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 sky is 

 not mentioned, although in the regions where they originated it exercises 

 such a special charm on every visitor. * * * The ten books of Eigveda 

 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- 

 tains, of sowing and ploughing, but never of green fields. Still more sur- 

 prising is the same phenomenon in the Zendavesta. 



" Aristotle, in his ' Meteorology,' calls the rainbow tri- coloured — viz., 

 red, yellow, and green. Two centuries before, Xenophanes had said, 

 ' What they call Iris is likewise a cloud, purple, reddish, and yellow in 



