CoLENSO. — 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 pecuUar tint,' the sky-blue." — (Lectures at the Charter 

 House, 1878 : Lecture I). 



" It is noteworthy down to what a late period both the Greeks and the 

 Eomans 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 

 Circensian 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 nuhilce, 

 hiemi. Classical antiquity, in fact, possessed no word for pure blue. * * * 

 The Eomanic languages found indeed no fit word for blue in the original 

 Eoman tongue, and were obliged partly to borrow it from the German. 

 Thus, among others, the French bleu and the older Italian hiavo, are, as is 

 well known, borrowed from the German hlau, which, in its turn, in the 

 earliest time signified black." — (Gieger, he. cit.) 



I have been at the trouble of bringing forward all this first-class autho- 

 rity 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. 

 Stack's statements. 



He says (p. 155) — " Eura (red) is used very often instead of where to 

 describe redness in any inanimate object." 



Mr. Stack evidently never heard of any of their (many) old supernatural 

 beings, still believed to be existing, called Kura ; and was not Kura a com- 

 mon term for the chief men in the olden time? e.g. — " I te oranga o tenei 

 motu, he Kicra te tangata." 



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