VI 
ORIGIN OF THE COLOUR-SENSE 
413 
the late Lazarus G-eiger, entitled, Zur JSntwicJcelungs-geschichte, 
der Menschheit (Stuttgart, 1871). According to this writer it 
appears that the colow of grass and foliage is never alluded to 
as a beauty in the Vedas or the Zendavesta, though these 
productions are continually extolled for other properties. 
Blue is described by terms denoting sometimes green, some- 
times black, showing that it was hardly recognised as a 
distinct colour. The colour of the sky is never mentioned in 
the Bible, the Vedas, the Homeric poems, or even in the 
Koran. The first distinct allusion to it known to Geiger is 
in an Arabic work of the ninth century. “Hyacinthine 
locks ” are black locks, and Homer calls iron “ violet- 
coloured.” Yellow was often confounded with green, but, 
along with red, it was one of the earliest colours to receive a 
distinct name. Aristotle names three colours in the rainbow 
— -red, yellow, and green. Two centuries earlier Xenophanes 
had described the rainbow as purple, reddish, and yellow. 
The Pythagoreans admitted four primary colours — white, 
black, red, and yellow; the Chinese the same, with the 
addition of green. 
Simultaneously with the first publication of this essay in 
Macmillan’s Magazine , there appeared in the Nineteenth Century 
an article by Mr. Gladstone on the Colour-sense, chiefly as 
exhibited in the poems of Homer. He shows that the few 
colour-terms used by Homer are applied to such different 
objects that they cannot denote colours only, as we perceive 
and differentiate them, but seem more applicable to different 
intensities of light and shade. Thus, to give one example, 
the word porphureos is applied to clothing, to the rainbow, 
to blood, to a cloud, to the sea, and to death ; and no one 
meaning will suit all these applications except comparative 
darkness. In other cases the same thing has many different 
epithets applied to it according to its different aspects or 
conditions ; and as the colours of objects are generally in- 
dicated in ancient writings by comparative rather than by 
abstract terms, — as wine-colour, fire-colour, bronze-colour, etc., 
— it becomes still more difficult to determine in any par- 
ticular case what colour was really meant. Mr. Gladstone’s 
general conclusion is, that the archaic man had a positive 
perception only of degrees of light and darkness, and that in 
