Mr Rivers , The colour vision of the Eskimo. 149 
juice, which is obviously related to, and may be the source of, the 
word for blue. 
It is worth noticing that the women of the party were quite as 
good as, if not superior to the men, both in matching and naming 
colours. The individual who seemed to me to have the most 
highly developed colour vocabulary was a middle-aged woman, 
Akopejok, and my opinion seemed to have been shared by the 
natives themselves, for on several occasions when men were unable 
to find a suitable name, they went to consult this woman. 
The superiority of women in colour nomenclature is familiar 
among ourselves, but I believe it to be unusual in low stages of 
culture. 
Erdmann mentions that women often have special names, 
different from those used by the men, and I looked out carefully 
for any indication of this in the names used for colour but failed 
to detect any difference. In some languages such differences are 
only present as slight modifications of termination, etc., and if this 
were the case in Eskimo, they may have escaped my notice. 
My previous experience of very defective colour nomenclature 
has been derived from races inhabiting the tropics and it seemed 
somewhat unnatural to find a far more highly developed language 
for colours in the inhabitants of a subarctic country such as 
Labrador. 
The Eskimo, however, told me that in the autumn they could 
see all the colours I had shown them in the hills of their country 
and it is possible that when colour is only a transient occurrence 
in the year’s experiences, it may excite more attention and there- 
fore receive more definite nomenclature than in those parts of the 
world where luxuriance of colour is so familiar that it receives 
little notice. 
So far as I can gather from reading accounts of Eskimo life, 
colour does not appear to be largely used in the dress or decora- 
tions of these people. Coloured beads are generally mentioned as 
part of the dress of the women and I noticed that those whom I 
examined were working with beads of various colours, including 
blue. 
