/ 
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
JUNE, 1885. 
I. HOMER COLOUR-BLIND. 
By Jabez Hogg, F.R.M.S., M.R.C.S., &c. 
S ^HE faculty of judging of colour with accuracy and 
), precision may doubtless be considerably improved or 
augmented by education. But whether the colour 
sense has undergone any appreciable amount of change or 
development in historic times it is hardly possible to say. 
The Evolution hypothesis in no way assists in the elucida- 
tion of the question ; no information whatever is derived 
from a retrospective examination of two or three thousand 
years or more, going back to the days of Anaxagoras, or 
of Homer. Hitherto Homer’s biographers have failed to 
convince scholars that he, like our own Milton, was blind ; 
others, with no better purpose, allege that he simply laboured 
under a special defedf of vision, of a nameless character. 
More recently it has been said “ that, judging by the colour 
epithets Homer employed in his poems, his organ of light 
and colour, and by inference that of the Greeks of his day, 
was only partially developed as compared with that of our 
own.” Mr. Gladstone* first broached this theory, and his 
conclusions were based partly on the supposed defectiveness 
of Homer’s colour vocabulary, which includes no epithet for 
either green or blue, and partly on the vague and not unfre- 
quently contradictory manner in which he employed a large 
number of terms when writing of colour. A later critic t 
* The Nineteenth Century, O&ober, 1877. 
f Ibid., February, 1885. 
VOL. VII. (THIRD SERIES). Z 
