The first of the series is BROWN, a term which, in its widest acceptation, has been used to include vulgarly every kind of dark broken colour, and is, in a more limited sense, the rather indefinite name of a very extensive class of colours of warm or tawny hues. Accordingly there are browns of every denomination except blue; to wit, yellow-brown, red-brown, orange-brown, purple-brown, citrine-brown, russet-brown, &c. But there is no such thing as a blue-brown, nor, strictly, any other coloured brown in which blue predominates; such predominance of a cold colour at once carrying the compound into the class of gray, ashen, or slate. Brown comprises the hues called dun, hazel, auburn, feuillemort, mort d'ore, &c.; several of which have been already mentioned as allied to the tertiary colours. The term _brown_, then, denotes rightly a warm broken colour, of which _yellow_ is a chief constituent: hence brown is in some measure to shade what yellow is to light. Hence, also, proper quantities of either the three primaries, the three secondaries, or the three tertiaries, produce variously a brown mixture. Browns contribute to coolness and clearness by contrast when opposed to pure colours, and Rubens more especially appears to have employed them upon this principle; although the same may be said of Titian, Correggio, Paulo Veronese, and all the best colourists. Being a sort of intermedia between positive colours and neutrality, browns equally contrast colour and shade. This accounts for their vast importance in painting, and the necessity of preserving them distinct from other colours, to which they give foulness in mixture; and to this is due their use in backgrounds and in relieving of coloured objects. The tendency in the compounds of colours to run into brownness and warmth is one of the common natural properties of colours which occasions them to deteriorate or defile each other in mixture. Brown by consequence is synonymous with foul or dirty, as opposed to fair or clean; and hence brown, which is the nearest of the semi-neutrals in relation to light, is to be avoided in mixture with light colours. Yet is it an example of the wisdom of nature's Author that brown is rendered, like green, a prevailing hue, and in particular an earth colour, as a contrast which is harmonized by the blueness and coldness of the sky. This tendency will likewise explain the use of brown in harmonizing and toning, as well as the great number of natural and artificial pigments and colours so called. It was the fertility and abundance of browns that caused our great landscape-colourist Wilson, when a friend went exultingly to tell him that he had discovered a new brown, to check him in his characteristic way, with--"I'm sorry for it: we have gotten too many of them already." Nevertheless, fine transparent browns are obviously very valuable.