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Gladstone from Homer, thinks that they point to the colour 
blindness of the person using them. He thus summarises 
his conclusions : — 
"1. That Homer’s applications of colour epithets are in 
many cases inconsistent with the normal ideas in regard to 
them. This is the first and most general symptom of colour 
blindness. 2. That this inconsistency is particularly notice- 
able in the use of the expressions for red and green. This 
is a further and more definite symptom, showing the pecu- 
liarly defective sensations in regard to these particular 
colours. 3. But that when the objects referred to are classified 
in two groups according to the two colour sensations they 
respectively offer to the colour blind eye, the use of the 
colour epithets becomes consistent, no epithet belonging to 
one group being used, except in one doubtful case, for an 
object belonging to the other. This is a still more definite 
symptom, pointing, as it seems to me, to the dichromic 
nature of the malady.” — Nature, Oct. 31, 1878, pp. 703-4. 
These results if accepted might be interpreted in two ways. 
It might be, and has been contended, that the Greeks 
generally were colour blind. If this be rejected, there 
remains the further possibility that the Homeric colour ter- 
minology was not a matter of racial but of individual 
peculiarity. In fact, that although the Greeks were not 
colour blind Homer might be. 
Another disciple of the same school was the late Prof. 
Lazarus Geiger, who tells us that blue is not used as an 
epithet of the sky in the Big- Veda, the Zend-Avesta, the Old 
Testament, the Homeric poems, nor in the Koran, and that 
Alkindi, writing in the 9th century, is the first to speak of the 
azure of the sky. Geiger also says that green is not named 
in the Big-Yeda, that Aristotle speaks of the rainbow as red, 
yellow, and green, that Xenophanes regarded it as purple, 
reddish, and yellow, and that Democritus regarded black, 
white, red and yellow as the fundamental colours, and that 
