Light and color are the themes of the poet. But they and the flowers attract the theologian also. Franz Delitzsch produced his _Studies in Color and Talks on Flowers_ in 1888 (an English version appearing in the following year). The book gives the lie to the supposition that the technical scholar is so engaged in dissecting things of beauty, that he is blind to the beauty of things. Delitzsch--the student and interpreter of the Bible--assures us that he could not remember the time when he did not muse on the language of colors; while, as for flowers, they ever had heavenly things to tell him; in their perfume he felt “the nearness and breath of the Creator.” Hence he called his book _Iris_. “The prismatic colours of the rainbow, the brilliant sword-lily, that wonderful part of the eye which gives it its colour, and the messenger of heaven who beams with joy, youth, beauty, and love, are all called _Iris_.” A pretty notion, this, so to name a book which is occupied largely with the lore of Bible and Talmud. But the question arises: Did the olden Hebrews and their rabbinic descendants appreciate colors? Here we are face to face with a basic error to which some investigators have succumbed. They rely too much on _words_. The Hebrew names for colors are vague and few. Does it, however, follow that the ancient people were unable to enjoy the blue of the sky because they had no word for sky-blue? Men do not _name_ everything they _know_. There is, for instance, no specific Hebrew for _volcano_, yet there are a score of passages in which volcanic phenomena are forcibly described in the Old Testament. Delitzsch did not belong to the superficial theorists just cited. He points out that, though biblical language has no adjective for blue, it compares the sky to sapphire in the Sinaitic theophany (Exodus 24. 10), as well as in Ezekiel’s vision of the divine throne. “Sapphire-blue is the blue of heaven; the colour of the atmosphere as illumined by the sun, through which shine the dark depths of space, the colour of the finite pervaded by the infinite, the colour taken by that which is most heavenly as it comes down to the earthly, the colour of the covenant between God and man.” So, too, the Midrash says of the blue fringe worn by Israelites on the corners of their garments--a blue of the purple hyacinth hue--that it was reminiscent of the heavens and the Throne of Glory. And blue, continues Delitzsch, passes almost universally as the color of fidelity. He proves this by reference to German and Sanskrit. The Indians would say of a steadfast man that he was “as unchangeable as the indigo flower,” which is as durable as it is lovely. “But in biblical symbolism there is associated with blue the idea of the blue sky, and with the blue sky the idea of the Godhead coming forth from its mysterious dwelling in the unseen world, and graciously condescending to the creature.” Delitzsch, scientific commentator