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vi ORIGIN OF THE COLOUR-SENSE 413the late Lazarus Geiger, entitled, Zur Entwickelungs-geschicUeder Menschheit (Stuttgart, 1871). According to this writer itappears that the colour of grass and foliage is never alluded toas a beauty in the Vedas or the Zendavesta, though theseproductions are continually extolled for other properties.Blue is described by terms denoting sometimes green, sometimesblack, showing that it was hardly recognised as adistinct colour. The colour of the skyis never mentioned inthe Bible, the Vedas, the Homeric poems, or even in theKoran. The first distinct allusion to it known to Geiger isin an Arabic work of the ninth century. "Hyacinthinelocks" are black locks, and Homer calls iron "violetcoloured."Yellow was often confounded with green, but,along with red, it was one of the earliest colours to receive adistinct name. Aristotle names three colours in the rainbowred, yellow, and green. Two centuries earlier Xenophaneshad described the rainbow as purple, reddish, and yellow.The Pythagoreans admitted four primary colours white,black, red, and yellow; the Chinese the same, with theaddition of green.Simultaneously with the first publication of this essay inMacmillan's Magazine, there appeared in the Nineteenth Centuryan article by Mr. Gladstone on the Colour-sense, chiefly asexhibited in the poems of Homer. He shows that the fewto such differentcolour -terms used by Homer are appliedobjects that they cannot denote colours only, as we perceiveand differentiate them, but seem more applicable to differentintensities 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 onemeaning will suit all these applications except comparativedarkness. In other cases the same thing has many differentepithets applied to it according to its different aspects orconditions ;and as the colours of objects are generally indicatedin ancient writings by comparative rather than byabstract terms,as wine-colour, fire-colour, bronze-colour, etc.,it becomes still more difficult to determine in any particularcase what colour was really meant. Mr. Gladstone'sgeneral conclusion is, that the archaic man had a positiveperception only of degrees of light and darkness, and that in