Concerning Eyes. 197 
have I been gratified by the sight of emerald eyes. 
T have seen eyes called green, that is, eyes with a 
greenish tinge or light in them, but they were not 
the eyes I sought. One can easily forgive the poets 
their misleading descriptions, since they are not 
trustworthy guides, and very often, like Humpty 
Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, make 
words do “extra work.’’ For sober fact one is 
accustomed to look to men of science; yet, strange 
to say, while these complain that we—the unscien- 
tific ones—are without any settled and correct ideas 
about the colour of our own eyes, they have 
endorsed the poet’s fable, and have even taken 
considerable pains to persuade the world of its 
truth. Dr. Paul Broca is their greatest authority. 
In his Manual for Anthropologists he divides 
human eyes into four distinct types—orange, green, 
blue, grey; and these four again into five varieties 
each. The symmetry of such a classification sug- 
gests at once that it is an arbitrary one. Why 
orange, for instance? Light hazel, clay colour, red, 
dull brown, cannot properly be called orange ; but the 
division requires the five supposed varieties of the 
dark pigmented eye to be grouped under one name, 
and because there is yellow pigment in some dark 
eyes they are all called orange. Again, to make the 
five grey varieties the lightest grey is made so very 
light that only when placed on a sheet of white 
paper does it show grey at all; but there is always 
some colour in the human skin, so that Broca’s 
eye would appear absolutely white by contrast—-a 
