800 PROFESSOR PIAZZI SMYTH ON COLOUR, 
they claimed the introduction of so apparently opposite a tint as that species of 
brown, in place of green, as the only mode of preserving the harmony of their 
pictures. The Edinburgh National Gallery too, possesses a costly and, by real 
connoisseurs, highly appreciated landscape of Titian’s (painted for an Emperor), 
with the trees and grass successfully rendered of very nearly the ancient violin 
hue. Some rash young Academicians of our present days, I am informed, 
presume to laugh at the long-shaped painting, and protest that any school-boy, 
of their teaching, could paint better than that! Greener, no doubt; but 
Titian’s work, for deep reasons of his own, is most certainly without the 
slightest pretence or attempt to imitate green there, at least as ordinary men 
see it; while the sky is more glaucous than the raw blue which the lads, his 
criticizers, would probably have adopted. 
Yet had the social and educated opinion of that age been sufficiently 
advanced in our modern dichroic spectroscopy, to have allowed the great 
colour artist to go just one step further; and use, in place of mere heated 
brown for green, that which Nature herself has long ago stamped as an 
exchangeable substitute for green in the cause of pictorial harmony; viz., some 
variety or other of that wondrous colouration, red,—there can be little doubt 
that Titian’s work would have ranged through a greater number of octaves of 
tints and hues, and been a more ecstatic triumph of chromatic effect than it is; 
or more like one of Turner’s masterpieces of Sunset, which goes on increasing 
in value from generation to generation, even in proportion as its rubric grandeur 
is worthily understood and intelligently admired. But when actually that is 
sometimes run down in very unscientific art coteries, innocent of the smallest 
acquaintance with instrumental spectroscopy and its colour-researching power, 
the real seat of the mischief may be, not that the stigmatised ‘ colour-blind” 
persons have a di-chroicising fluid in their eyes, and which, in reality, enables 
them to see almost with a Titian or a Turner,—but that the general public has 
not anything of the kind ; has in fact imperfect eyes; eyes admitting too much 
yellow ; faded eyes without “visual purple,” as poor, tame, flat and unprofit- 
able to a true artist, as watery blood without healthy, colouring globules must 
be to any one whatever. 
There is also another very notable artistical gain to the di-chroicised eye 
when contemplating Nature esthetically, and with music in the soul,—in the 
facility which such an eye possesses for turning heavy, inky b/ue, but no shades 
of brown, into light. And this is a feature, the abstract principle and spectrum 
foundation of which, I am happy to acknowledge, is most clearly and indepen- 
dently, though involuntarily, set forth, in Professor CLERK MAXxwELL’s extremely 
scientific paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1860. For he there most 
expressly places, and pictures the brightest and whitest light of the whole 

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