Mr Rivers, The colour vision of the Eskimo. 149 



juice, which is obviously related to, and may be the source of, the 

 word for blue. 



It is worth noticing that the women of the party were quite as 

 good as, if not superior to the men, both in matching and naming 

 colours. The individual who seemed to me to have the most 

 highly developed colour vocabulary was a middle-aged woman, 

 Akopejok, and my opinion seemed to have been shared by the 

 natives themselves, for on several occasions when men were unable 

 to find a suitable name, they went to consult this woman. 



The superiority of women in colour nomenclature is familiar 

 among ourselves, but I believe it to be unusual in low stages of 

 culture. 



Erdmann mentions that women often have special names, 

 different from those used by the men, and I looked out carefully 

 for any indication of this in the names used for colour but failed 

 to detect any difference. In some languages such differences are 

 only present as slight modifications of termination, etc., and if this 

 were the case in Eskimo, they may have escaped my notice. 



My previous experience of very defective colour nomenclature 

 has been derived from races inhabiting the tropics and it seemed 

 somewhat unnatural to find a far more highly developed language 

 for colours in the inhabitants of a subarctic country such as 

 Labrador. 



The Eskimo, however, told me that in the autumn they could 

 see all the colours I had shown them in the hills of their country 

 and it is possible that when colour is only a transient occurrence 

 in the year's experiences, it may excite more attention and there- 

 fore receive more definite nomenclature than in those parts of the 

 world where luxuriance of colour is so familiar that it receives 

 little notice. 



So far as I can gather from reading accounts of Eskimo life, 

 colour does not appear to be largely used in the dress or decora- 

 tions of these people. Coloured beads are generally mentioned as 

 part of the dress of the women and I noticed that those whom I 

 examined were working with beads of various colours, including 

 blue. 



