77 
Ordinary Meeting, February 7th, 1882. 
R,. Angus Smith, Ph.D., F.R.S., &c., in the Chair. 
“The Colour Sense and Colour Names,” hy William 
E. A. Axon, M.RS.L. 
The recent important paper of Dr. Schunck on the terms 
used to denote colour opens out the entire question — and a 
very fascinating one it is — of the origin and development of 
the colour sense. In the course of his opening address at 
the British Association Sir John Lubbock referred to the 
subject of blue .blindness, a topic which has at once a prac- 
tical and an archseological interest. Mr. Gladstone, in the 
course of one of his Homeric studies, made the suggestion 
that the ancient Greeks were unable to distinguish blue. 
As far back as 1858 Mr. Gladstone asserted “ That Homer’s 
perceptions of the prismatic colours, or colours of the rain- 
bow, which depend upon the decomposition of light by 
refraction, and a fortiori of their compounds, were as a 
general rule vague and indeterminate.” He however re- 
turned to the subject in an article which appeared in the 
Nineteenth Century for October, 1877. After analysing the 
Homeric epithets and referring to the investigations of 
Magnus and Geiger, he unequivocally adopts the suggestion 
that the colour sense was comparatively imperfect in the 
Homeric age. Mr. Gladstone’s general conclusion is, that 
archaic man had a positive perception only of degrees of 
light and darkness, and that in Homer’s time he had ad- 
vanced to the imperfect discrimination of red or yellow, 
but no further ; green of grass and foliage, or the blue of 
the sky being never once referred to. Dr. William Pole, who 
is himself colour blind, taking the instances cited by Mr. 
Proceedings— Lit. & Phil. Soc.— Yol. XXL— No. 7. — Session 1881-2. 
