The observations made on the color vision of childhood may be regarded as indirect evidence that color vision has been a comparatively recent acquirement of the human race.
In addition to possible physiological conditions there are certain other factors which may have taken part in the production of the characteristic features of primitive color language.
On the more special question of the color sense of Homer, I believe that Gladstone and Geiger went too far. The evidence seems to me to suggest one of two possibilities. It is possible that to the Greeks of the time of Homer green and blue were less definite, possibly duller and darker colors than they are to us. It is, however, possible that the language used by Homer was only a relic of an earlier defect of this kind, the defect of nomenclature persisting after the color sense had become completely developed, language lagging behind sense in the race, as it appears to do in the child. According to the latter view, the defective terminology of Homer would be a phenomenon of the same order as the absence of a word for blue in such languages as Welsh, Chinese and Hebrew at the present day. It would not necessarily show the actual existence of a defective color sense, but would suggest that at some earlier stage of culture there had been defective sensitiveness for certain colors.
The evidence derived from poetry and art must always be in some degree unsatisfactory, owing to the great part which convention plays in these productions of the human mind. Still, every convention must have had a starting point, and though, in some cases, it is possible that considerations of technique[1] may have originated the conventional use of color, it seems more probable that the predominance of red and deficiency of blue, both in the color language and in the decoration of the ancient Greeks, however conventional they may have become, nevertheless owe their origin to the special nature of the development of the color sense.
The subject of the evolution of the color sense in man is one which can only be settled by the convergence to one point of lines of investigation which are usually widely separated. The sciences of archæology, philology, psychology and physiology must all be called upon to contribute to the elucidation of this problem. I do not wish to do more than reopen the subject, and shall be contented if I have shown that the views of Gladstone and Geiger cannot be contemptuously dismissed as they were twenty years ago.
- ↑ As an instance of the origin of a convention in technique, Mr. Sikes has suggested to me the red figures on Greek vases. Early Greek vases were made of a reddish material, on which the figures were designed in black. At a later time, the vessels were black and the figures red, the conventional persistence of red decoration in this case having had its starting-point in the special nature of the material originally used in the manufacture of the vases.
