The Popular Science Monthly, September, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900Various
Science
The Popular Science Monthly, September, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
We have now passed in review all the influences which, by force
of their powerful attraction or repulsion, have during countless
ages impressed on man, and often on his ancestors, the strong and
poignant emotions which accompany the sensation of the most vividly
and persistently seen of all colors. We find evidence of the reality
of the influences we have traced--especially those of fire, blood
and love--in Christian ecclesiastical symbolism, according to which
red variously signifies ardent love, burning zeal, energy, courage,
cruelty and bloodthirstiness. To the antagonism and complexity of these
influences we must doubtless attribute the disturbing nature of the
emotion aroused by the group of red sensations and the fluctuations in
the predilection felt towards it. It is at once the most attractive and
the most repulsive of colors. To enjoy it we must use it economically.
The vision of poppies on a background of golden corn, the glint of
roses embowered in green leaves, the sudden flash of a scarlet flower
on a southern woman’s dark hair--it is in such visions as these that
red gives us its emotional thrill altogether untouched by pain. If the
‘multitudinous seas’ were indeed ‘incarnadined’ for us in ‘one red,’
if the sky were scarlet, or all vegetation crimson, the horror of the
world would be painful to contemplate for nervous systems moulded
to our vision of nature. Our eyes have developed in a world where
the green and blue rays meet us at every step, and where we have in
consequence been almost as dulled to them as we are to the weight of
the atmosphere that presses in on us on every side. It is under the
clouded skies of northern lands that blue is counted the loveliest of
colors; it is in the desert that green becomes supremely beautiful and
sacred.
THE EXPENDITURE OF THE WORKING CLASSES[D].
BY HENRY HIGGS.
[D] Address by the President to the Economic Science and
Statistics Section at the Dover meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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