Colour vision : $b Being the Tyndall Lectures delivered in 1894 at the Royal InstitutionAbney, William de Wiveleslie, Sir
Science
Colour vision : $b Being the Tyndall Lectures delivered in 1894 at the Royal Institution
Abney, William de Wiveleslie, Sir
Color vision
correct guesses may be made, for then the colours will be saturated,
and the colour blind, if they are intelligent, will know that a green
to them is white or pale in colour compared with red, though of the
same hue. If white be mixed with the red the wrong name is bound to
be given, for they will be unable to distinguish it from the green,
because it is then a less saturated colour. Passing from green to red
and mixing the colour more or less with white, the most--I was going
to say grotesque--telling mistakes are made. A further excellent test
is to place a cell containing a solution of bichromate in the path of
the reflected beam, and cause the observer to match its colour with
the light coming through two slits, one in the red near C, and the
other in the green near E. Defective colour perception will be well
demonstrated. There are various other artifices which can be employed
in the spectrum test, which would be too long to recount here, and if
there be two sets of apparatus the tests are practically unlimited in
number.
There are cases in which an observer who may have normal vision may
wish to be reported as colour blind. A seaman’s life is not always a
happy one, and a boy on a training-ship, knowing that a failure in
colour vision will free him from a sea life, may be anxious to be told
he has failed in colour vision. By “coaching” in the Holmgren test he
might manage to obtain a “failure,” but a malingerer is sure to be
detected by the spectrum method of testing. He may call diluted red
green, and he may declare he sees a neutral point in the spectrum, but
if he be tested with the diluted colours near his supposed neutral
point, he is sure to fall into a trap. He will make a mistake in
calling a patch green when it ought to be white, or white when it ought
to be green, if he were truly colour deficient--indeed, a malingerer
has no chance of escaping detection with the spectrum tests. It is not
an uninteresting experiment to get an acute observer who has normal
colour vision, and is accustomed to the spectrum test, to feign colour
blindness, and examine him in this manner. He never fails to make such
mistakes as would lead to his detection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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