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of this assertion quote the line of a distinguished poet now 
living who speaks of the “ costly scarlet wine/' a term which 
is still more precise and emphatic than simple red. In the 
course of an investigation, undertaken a short time ago with 
another chemist, I found that my collaborateur and myself 
never exactly agreed as to the names to be given to the 
colours we saw. The series which he named blue, violet, 
purple, crimson, red, orange, I called violet, purple, crimson, 
red, orange, yellow, i.e., what was to his eye blue was to mine 
violet ; his violet was my purple, and so on. There was no 
reason to suppose that our perception of colour differed, the 
difference was in my opinion simply one of terms. 
The writings of ancient authors abound with instances of 
the use of colour names which are seemingly incorrect. 
We find in Horace (Book IV., Ode 1) the lines : 
Tempestivius in domum 
Paulli, purpureis ales oloribus 
Comiss abere Maximi, 
Si torrere jecnr quseris idoneum. 
Another author says : 
Purpurea sub nive terra latet 
Brachia purpurea candidiora nive. 
We are told by scholars that in these cases purpuereus 
means bright, shining, but it still remains to be explained 
why a word, which generally denotes a positive colour, 
whatever that colour may have been, comes in a few in- 
stances to be applied to white objects such as swans and 
snow. Of course the definition of a word may be so extended 
as to include any number of widely different meanings 
some of these meanings being perhaps due to its mistaken 
use by authors. It would probably not be difficult to find 
passages in modern authors in which the word blue some- 
times means green, sometimes violet. I met with a case in 
point recently on reading again Goethe’s delightful auto- 
biography “ Wahrheit und Pichtung.” The author, when a 
