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
wave-length; in testing with colored wools no mistake was ever made
with reds, but blues and greens were constantly confused, as were blue
and violet.
It may even be argued that the same defect exists to a minor degree
not only among the peoples of Eastern Asia whose æsthetic sense is
highly developed, but among civilized Europeans when any kind of
color blindness is altogether excluded. This was noted long since by
Holmgren, who remarked that some persons, though able to distinguish
between blue and green wools when placed together, were liable to call
the blue wool green, and the green blue, when they saw them separately.
Magnus also showed that such an inability is apt to appear at a very
early stage in some persons when the illumination is diminished,
although the perception of red and yellow remains perfectly distinct.
He further showed that blue and green at certain distances are often
much more difficult to recognize than red. Most people probably are
conscious of difficulty in distinguishing blue and green pigments
with diminished light and find that blue easily passes into black.
Violet also appears for many people to be merely a variety of blue;
the word itself, we may note, is recent in our language, and plays
a very small part in our poetic literature, and in fact the color
itself, if we rigidly exclude purple, is extremely rare in nature. It
is a noteworthy fact in this connection that in normal persons the
color sense may be easily educated; this is not merely a fact of daily
observation, but has been exactly demonstrated by Féré, who by means of
his chromoptoscopic boxes, containing very dilute colored solutions,
found that with practice it was possible to recognize solutions which
had previously seemed uncolored. It is also noteworthy that in the
achromatopsia of the hysterical, as Charcot showed and as Parimand has
since confirmed, the order in which the colors usually disappear is
violet, green, blue, red; sometimes the paradoxical fact is found that
red will give a luminous sensation in a contracted visual field when
even white gives no luminous sensation. This persistence of red vision
in the hysterical is only one instance of a predilection for red which
has often been noted as very marked among the hysterical. Red also
exerted a great fascination over the victims of the mediæval hysterical
epidemics of tarantism in Italy, while the victims of the German
mediæval epidemic of St. Vitus’s dance imagined that they were immersed
in a stream of blood which compelled them to leap up.
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