The Popular Science Monthly, August, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900Various
Science
The Popular Science Monthly, August, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
That, in the main, is a conclusion which still holds good. In all parts
of the world it has been found that color discrimination, even amongst
the lowest savages, is far more accurate than color nomenclature. Thus
of an African Bantu tribe, the Mang’anja, Miss Werner states that
they can discriminate all varieties of blue in beads, but call them
all black. The sky is black; so is any green, brown or grey article,
though a very bright grey counts as white. Violet or purple is black.
Yellow is either red or white. A word supposed sometimes to mean green
really means raw, unripe or even wet. Thus the Mang’anja only have
three colors--black, white and red. In quite a different region, the
Zulus, more advanced in color nomenclature, have not only black, white
and red, but a word which may mean either green or blue, and another
which means yellow, buff or grey, or some shade of brown. At the same
time it now appears that the earlier scientific writers on this subject
were not entirely wrong in stating that among savages there is some
actual failure of perception at the short wave end of the spectrum,
although they were wrong in arguing that it was necessarily involved
in the defects of color vocabulary, and in imagining that it could
be as extensive as that hypothesis demanded. It now appears that the
conclusions reached by Hugo Magnus of Breslau, as expressed in 1883
in his study ‘Ueber Ethnologische Untersuchungen des Farbensinnes,’
fairly answer to the facts. In large measure relying on the examination
of 300 Chukchis made by Almquist during the Nordenskiold Expedition,
Magnus concluded that although the color vision of the uncivilized has
the same range from red to violet as that of the civilized and all the
colors can usually be separately distinguished, there is sometimes a
certain dullness, a diminished energy of sensation, as regards green
and blue, the shorter and more refrangible waves of the spectrum, while
the colors at the other end are perceived with much greater vividness.
Stephenson, more recently, among over one thousand Chinese, examined at
various places, found only one case of color blindness, but a frequent
tendency to confuse green and blue and also blue and purple, while
Dr. Adele Fielde, of Swatow, China, among 1,200 Chinese of both sexes
examined by Thomson’s wool test, found that more than half mixed up
green and blue, and many even seemed to be quite blind to violet.
Ernest Krause also has argued that primitive man was most sensitive to
the red end of the spectrum, hence setting about to obtain red pigments
and acquiring definite names for them, an explanation which is accepted
by Karl von den Steinen to account for the phenomena among the Central
Brazilians. The recent investigations of Rivers at Torres Straits have
confirmed the conclusions of Magnus. He found that, corresponding
to the defect of color terminology, though to a much less degree,
there appeared to be an actual defect of vision for colors of short
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