Homer Colour-blind. 
316 
[June, 
blue are called black : these are fadts of interest to naturalists 
as well as philologists, but they do not assist us over much in 
the interpretation placed by scholars on the peculiarities of 
the Homeric colour vocabulary. It is quite unnecessary to 
go to India for parallel examples and incongruities of coloui 
epithets, as our own vocabulary and the usage of our own 
people furnish examples enough. In many agricultural dis- 
tricts brown and reddish brown cows, of all shades of colour, 
are spoken of as red cows, purple berries as black-berries, 
and so forth. This form of speech is in no way conclusive 
of a meagre vocabulary : it is simply a conventional defedt 
of language, a provincialism, which has lingered among the 
bucolic populations of this country for ages, and it is only 
to be got rid of by education or by mixing with urban 
peoples. It is no better proof of a limited or defective 
colour vocabulary than is the slipshod clipping of words so 
common among us, and which is excessively bewildering to 
the intelligent foreigner. An idiomatic phraseology is 
thought to be in no way significant of any meagreness of 
vocabulary among civilised nations. With reference, how- 
ever, to the extent of the colour vocabulary especially, it is 
a faCt that the colour sense can, equally with the other 
senses and with language as a whole, be cultivated and 
improved by education. 
The aboriginal races of the Earth have heretofore exhi- 
bited great ignorance of colour, and their vocabularies are 
consequently of a very limited nature. But this was not 
the case with the Greeks of Homer’s day, nor of the eailiei 
Eastern races, whose love of colour has been unmistakably 
made historic in their textile fabrics, mosaics, and frescoes, 
which have been so wonderfully preserved as a proof of a 
fully-developed colour sense. 
A very large number of our lower class of workmen are 
quite unable to name colours corredtly. Their colour voca- 
bulary, on examination, has been found to be extremely 
limited. Some trades seem to exert a deteriorating influence : 
for example, the men working in agas-fadtory were examined 
as to their acquaintance with colours ; sixty-five stokers 
were tested, and twenty-four of them were found colour- 
blind. Of ordinary working men, a little higher in the social 
scale, a considerable percentage were discovered to be 
ignorant of colours. Of 268 soldiers tested only 163 exhi- 
bited an intelligent knowledge of colours, while 73 named 
them indifferently well, and 39'iS per cent were unable 
to discriminate perfectly between red and green, the majority 
being, in fadt, red-blind. On one of the French railways, 
where all candidates for employment are very carefully 
