“statesman, orator, and scholar”: John Stuart Blackie, Horae Hellenicae (1874). E. A. W. Buchholz’s Die Homerischen Realien (1871) was dedicated to “dem eifrigen Pfleger und Förderer der Homerischen Forschung.”
“a little hobby-horsical”: Letter to the Duke of Argyll, May 28, 1863 (Tennyson 1897, 493).
“Mr. Gladstone may be a learned, enthusiastic”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the Times, Nov. 8, 1858. On the reception of Gladstone’s Homeric studies, see Bebbington 2004.
“characteristic of the inability of the English”: Marx, letter to Engels, Aug. 13, 1858.
“I find in the plot of the Iliad”: Morley 1903, 544
page 28–29 Ilios, Wilusa, and the historical background of the Iliad: Latacz 2004; Finkelberg 2005.
Leto “represents the Blessed Virgin”: Gladstone 1858, 2:178; see also 2:153.
Gladstone’s originality: Previous scholars, from as early as Scaliger in 1577, had commented about the paucity of color descriptions in ancient writers (see Skard 1946, 166), but no one before Gladstone understood that the differences between us and the ancients went beyond occasional divergences in taste and fashion. In the eighteenth century, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Doering wrote (1788, 88) that “it is clear that in ancient times both Greeks and Romans could do without many names of colors, from which a later era was in no way able to abstain, once the tools of luxury had grown infinitely. For the austere simplicity of such unsophisticated men abhorred that great variety of colors used for garments and buildings, which in later times softer and more delicate men pursued with the greatest zeal.” (“Hoc autem primum satis constat antiquissimis temporibus cum graecos tum romanos multis colorum nominibus carere potuisse, quibus posterior aetas, luxuriae instumentis in infinitum auctis, nullo modo supersedere potuit. A multiplici enim et magna illa colorum in vestibus aedificiis et aliis operibus varietate, quam posthac summo studio sectati sunt molliores et delicatiores homines, abhorrebat austera rudium illorum hominum simplicitas.”) And in his Farbenlehre (1810, 54), Goethe explained about the ancients that “Ihre Farbenbenennungen sind nicht fix und genau bestimmt, sondern beweglich und schwankend, indem sie nach beiden Seiten auch von angrenzenden Farben gebraucht werden. Ihr Gelbes neigt sich einerseits ins Rote, andrerseits ins Blaue, das Blaue teils ins Grüne, teils ins Rote, das Rote bald ins Gelbe, bald ins Blaue; der Purpur schwebt auf der Grenze zwischen Rot und Blau und neigt sich bald zum Scharlach, bald zum Violetten. Indem die Alten auf diese Weise die Farbe als ein nicht nur an sich Bewegliches und Flüchtiges ansehen, sondern auch ein Vorgefühl der Steigerung und des Rückganges haben: so bedienen sie sich, wenn sie von den Farben reden, auch solcher Ausdrücke, welche diese Anschauung andeuten. Sie lassen das Gelbe röteln, weil es in seiner Steigerung zum Roten führt, oder das Rote gelbeln, indem es sich oft zu diesem seinen Ursprunge zurück neigt.”
sea red because of algae: Maxwell-Stuart 1981, 10.
“blue and violet reflects”: Christol 2002, 36.
“if any man should say”: Blackie 1866, 417.
“a born Chancellor of the Exchequer”: “Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric studies,” Times, Aug. 12, 1858.
Violet iron: Iliad 23.850; violet wool: Odyssey 9.426; violet sea: Odyssey 5.56.
no one can be insensitive to the appeal of the colors: Goethe, Beiträge zur Chromatik.
“Homer had before him the most perfect example of blue”: Gladstone 1858, 3:483.
“As obliterating fire lights up”: Iliad 2.455–80.
page 35 “their head aslant”: Iliad 8.306.
“blackening beneath the ripple of the West Wind”: Iliad 7.64.
“have been determined for us by Nature”: Gladstone 1858, 3:459.
“continued to be both faint and indefinite”: Gladstone 1858, 3:493.
“only after submitting the facts”: Gladstone 1877, 366.
“the organ of colour and its impressions”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.
“the perceptions so easy and familiar to us”: Gladstone 1858, 3:496.
“The eye may require a familiarity”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.
“The organ was given to Homer”: Gladstone 1877, 388.
Gladstone accurate and farsighted: On the modernity of Gladstone’s analysis, see also Lyons 1999.
2: A LONG-WAVE HERRING
Geiger’s lecture: “Ueber den Farbensinn der Urzeit und seine Entwickelung” (Geiger 1878).
Geiger’s bold original theories: Many of these ideas, such as the discussion of the independent changes of sound and meaning, which anticipate Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign, or the systematic discussion of semantic developments from concrete to abstract, are found in Geiger 1868 and the posthumous Geiger 1872. See also Morpurgo Davies 1998, 176, for Geiger’s ideas on accent in Indo-European. For assessments of Geiger’s life and work, see Peschier 1871, Keller 1883, Rosenthal 1884.
Geiger’s curiosity piqued by Gladstone’s discoveries: It seems, however, that Geiger misread one aspect of Gladstone’s analysis, since he seems to think (1878, 50) that Gladstone believed in the legend of Homer’s blindness, whereas, as we have seen, Gladstone explicitly argued against this legend.
“These hymns, of more than ten thousand”: Geiger 1878, 47.
Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for “blue”: As various scholars from Delitzsch (1878, 260; 1898, 756) onward as well as Geiger himself (1872, 318) have pointed out, there is one cryptic remark in the Old Testament, in Exodus 24:10 (also echoes in Ezekiel 1:26), that seems, at least indirectly, to relate the sky to lapis lazuli. In Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, and seventy of the elders of Israel climb up Mount Sinai to see Yahweh: “And then they saw the God of Israel. Beneath his feet was something like a mosaic pavement of lapis lazuli, and like the very essence of the heavens as regards purity.” There are two descriptions of the “pavement” beneath God’s feet here: this surface is first said to have the appearance of a pattern of bricks of lapis lazuli, and secondly it is said to be pure “like the very essence of the heavens.” The sky itself is not directly compared to lapis lazuli, but it is hard to escape the impression that the two descriptions are based on a close association between the sky and this blue gemstone. On the interpretation of this passage, see Durham 2002, 344.
pages 44–45 Geiger quotes: 1878, 49, 57, 58.
Geiger’s confusions about black and white: Geiger may have assumed that black and white should be considered colors only if they have separate names from dark and bright. This may explain his obscure (and apparently conflicting) statements about the position of white with respect to red. In his lecture (1878, 57) he says: “Wei ist in [den ächten Rigvedalieder] von roth noch kaum gesondert.” But in the table of contents for the second (unfinished and posthumously published) volume of his Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (1872, 245), he uses the opposite order: “Roth im Rigveda noch nicht bestimmt von wei geschieden.” Unfortunately, the text of the unfinished volume stops before the relevant section, so it is impossible to ascertain what exactly Geiger meant on the subject of white.
Tantalizing hints in Geiger’s own notes: In Der Urpsrung der Sprache (1869, 242) he writes, “Da es sich auf niedrigen Entwickelungsstufen noch bei heutigen Völkern ähnlich verhält, würde es leicht sein zu zeigen.” And in his posthumously published notes, he explicitly considers the possibility that language lags behind perception (1872, 317–18): “[Es] setzt sich eine ursprünglich aus völligem Nichtbemerken hervorgegangene Gleichgültigkeit gegen die Farbe des Himmels . . . fort. Der Himmel in diesen [Texten wird] nicht etwa schwarz im Sinne von blau genant, sonder seine Bläue [wird] gänzlich verschwiegen, und ohne Zweifel geschieht dies weil dieselbe [die Bläue] nicht unmittelbar mit dem Dunkel verwechselt werden konnte. . . . Reizend ist es sodann, das Ringen eines unklaren, der Sprache und Vernunft überall um einige wenige Schritte vorauseilenden Gefühles zu beobachten, wie es . . . hie und da blo zufällig einen mehr oder weniger nahe kommenden Ausdruck leiht.”
Lagerlunda crash: Olsén 2004, 127ff., Holmgren
1878, 19–22, but for a critical view see Frey 1975. The danger to the railways from color-blind personnel was pointed out twenty years earlier, by George Wilson (1855), a professor of technology at the University of Edinburgh, but his book does not seem to have had much impact.
Color blindness in the newspapers: E.g., New York Times, “Color-blindness and its dangers” (July 8, 1878); “Color-blindness: How it endangers railroad travelers—some interesting experiments before a Massachusetts legislative committee” (Jan. 26, 1879); “Color-blindness of railroad men” (May 23, 1879); “Color-blind railroad men: A large percentage of defective vision in the employees of a Massachusetts road” (Aug. 17, 1879); “Color-blindness” (Aug. 17, 1879). See also Turner 1994, 177.
Magnus’s treatise: In fact, Magnus published two more or less identical monographs in the same year (1877a, 1877b), one of a more academic and the other of a more popular nature.
Geiger’s rousing speech: As described by Delitzsch 1878, 256.
Magnus’s evolutionary model: 1877b, 50.
“the retina’s performance was gradually increased”: Magnus 1877a, 19. See also Magnus 1877b, 47.
“still just as closed and invisible”: Magnus 1877a, 9.
Magnus’s theory ardently discussed: According to Turner 1994, 178, the literature on the Magnus controversy exploded to more than 6 percent of all publications on vision between 1875 and 1879.
Nietzsche on Greek color vision: Nietzsche 1881, 261. Orsucci 1996, 244ff., has shown that Nietzsche followed the debate over Magnus’s book in the first volume of the journal Kosmos.
Gladstone’s review of Magnus: Gladstone 1877.
“if the capacity of distinguishing colours”: Wallace 1877, 471n1. Wallace changed his mind the next year, however (1878, 246).
page 49 “the more delicate cones of the retina”: Lecture delivered on March 25, 1878 (Haeckel 1878, 114).
“and the results of this habit”: Lamarck 1809: 256–57.
Wallace on the giraffe’s neck: 1858, 61.
“when a boy, had the skin of both thumbs”: Darwin 1881, 257. Darwin also quotes approvingly “Brown-Sequard’s famous experiments” on guinea pigs, which were taken at the time to prove that the results of operations on certain nerves in the mother were inherited by the next generation.
The belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was virtually universal: Mayr 1991, 119. For an assessment of Weismann, see Mayr 1991, 111.
“Weismann began to investigate the point”: Shaw, introduction to Back to Methuselah (1921, xlix). Shaw in fact had a strong aversion to (neo-) Darwinism and passionately believed in Lamarckian evolution.
Weismann reported on the still ongoing experiment: 1892, 523n1, 514, 526–27.
Weismann’s remained the minority view: For example, in 1907, Oskar Hertwig (1907, 37), the director of the Anatomical and Biological Institute in Berlin, still predicted that in the end the Lamarckian mechanism would prove the right one. See also Mayr 1991, 119ff.
“the acquired aptitudes of one generation”: Gladstone 1858, 426, and similar formulation a few years later (1869, 539): “the acquired knowledge of one generation becomes in time the inherited aptitude of another.”
Magnus’s explicit reliance on the Lamarckian model: Magnus 1877b, 44, 50.
Criticism of Magnus: The earliest and most vocal critic of Magnus’s theory was Ernst Krause, one of Darwin’s first followers and popularizers in Germany (Krause 1877). Darwin himself felt that Magnus’s scenario was problematic. On June 30, 1877, Darwin wrote to Krause: “I have been much interested by your able argument against the belief that the sense of colour has been recently acquired by man.” Another vocal critic was the science writer Grant Allen (1878, 129–32; 1879), who argued that “there is every reason to think that the perception of colours is a faculty which man shares with all the higher members of the animal world. In no other way can we account for the varied hues of flowers, fruits, insects, birds, and mammals, all of which seem to have been developed as allurements for the eye, guiding it towards food or the opposite sex.” But the argument about the bright colors of animals was weakest exactly where it was most needed, because the coloring of mammals, as opposed to birds and insects, is extremely subdued, dominated by black, white, and shades of brown and gray. At the time, there was precious little direct evidence about which animals can see colors: bees and other insects had been shown to respond to color, but the evidence petered out when it came to the higher animals and especially to mammals, whose sense of color was shown (see Graber 1884) to be less developed than that of man. See also Donders 1884, 89–90, and, for a detailed account of the debate, Hochegger 1884, 132.
“we see in essence not with two eyes”: Delitzsch 1878, 267.
A short visit to the British museum: Allen 1879, 204.
“it does not seem plausible to us”: Magnus 1877c, 427. See also Magnus 1880, 10; Magnus 1883, 21.
3: THE RUDE POPULATIONS INHABITING FOREIGN LANDS
Passersby in the elegant Kurfürstendamm: Since 1925 this part of the street has been called Budapester Strasse.
Nubian display: Rothfels 2002, 84.
Nubians’ sense of color: Virchow 1878 (Sitzung am 19.10.1878), and Virchow 1879.
“rude populations inhabiting foreign lands”: Gatschet 1879, 475.
“apologized once that he couldn’t find a bottle”: Bastian 1869, 89–90.
Relevance of the “savages”: Darwin, for instance, suggested in a letter to Gladstone (de Beer 1958, 89) that one should ascertain whether “low savages” had names for shades of color: “I should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable for the Indians of Chilee and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight promontory and hill—even to a marvellous degree.”
“the color of any grass, weed or plant”: Gatschet 1879, 475, 477, 481.
Almquist’s reports: Almquist 1883, 46–47. If pressed, the Chukchis also produced other terms, but these seemed to be variable. In Berlin, Rudolf Virchow reached a similar conclusion about the color terminology of some of the Nubians (Virchow 1878, 353).
Nias in Sumatra: Magnus 1880, 8.
None of the Nubians failed to pick the right colors: Virchow 1878, 351n1.
Ovaherero: Magnus 1880, 9.
Magnus’s revised theory: Magnus 1880, 34ff.; Magnus 1881, 195ff.
Rivers’s life and work: Slobodín 1978.
“goodbye my friend—I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again”: Whittle 1997.
“Galileo of anthropology”: Lévi-Strauss 1968, 162.
“For the first time trained experimental psychologists”: Haddon 1910, 86.
“lively discussions were started”: Rivers 1901a, 53.
“seemed almost inexplicable, if blue”: Rivers 1901b, 51. See also Rivers 1901b, 46–47.
“certain degree of insensitiveness to blue”: Rivers 1901a, 94. Rivers also tried to show experimentally, using a device called a Lovibond tintometer, that the thresholds at which the natives could recognize very pale blue glass were higher than those of Europeans. The serious problems with his experiments were pointed out by Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924. Recently, two British scientists (Lindsey and Brown 2002) proposed a similar idea to Rivers’s, suggesting that people closer to the equator suffer from stronger UV radiation, which causes their retina to loose sensitivity to green and blue. The severe problems with this claim were pointed out by Regier and Kay 2004.
“One cannot, however, wholly”: Rivers 1901a, 94.
page 68 Siniy and goluboy in Russian: Corbett and Morgan 1988.
“attended carefully to the mental development”: C. Darwin to E. Krause, June 30, 1877.
Acquisition of colors by children: Pitchford and Mullen 2002, 1362; Roberson et al. 2006.
Bellona: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.
Reviews of Rivers: Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924.
4: THOSE WHO SAID OUR THINGS BEFORE US
“The life of yesterday”: Lambert 1960, 244
. The actual copy of this tablet is late, from Ashurbanipal’s library (seventh century BC). But while no earlier copies of this particular proverb have so far been found, the Sumerian proverbs in general go back at least to the Old Babylonian period (2000–1600 BC).
“What is said is just repetition”: Parkinson 1996, 649.
“Perish those who said our things before us”: Donatus’s phrase was mentioned by his student St. Jerome in Jerome’s commentrary on Ecclesiastes (Migne 1845, 1019): “Comicus ait: Nihil est dictum, quod non sit dictum prius, unde et præceptor meum Donatus, cum ipsum versiculum exponeret, Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.”
“The physical types chosen for representation”: Francis 1913, 524.
“We are probably justified in inferring”: Woodworth 1910a, 179.
Suggestion that Geiger’s sequence may have been just a coincidence: Woodworth 1910b.
“Physicists view the color-spectrum as a continuous scale”: Bloomfield 1933, 140.
“arbitrarily sets its boundaries”: Hjelmslev 1943, 48.
“there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division”: Ray 1953; see also Ray 1952, 258.
Bellonese color system: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.
Claims of arbitrariness in accounts before 1969: See Berlin and Kay 1969, 159–60n1.
“It seems no exaggeration to claim”: Sahlins 1976, 1.
page 85 “Only very occasionally is a discovery”: Newcomer and Faris 1971, 270.
Tzeltal foci: Berlin and Kay 1969, 32. Further detail (from Berlin’s unpublished ms.) in Maclaury 1997, 32, 258–59, 97–104.
Alleged universality of the foci: Berlin and Kay’s claims about the universality of the foci soon received a boost from the Berkeley psychologist Eleanor Rosch Heider (1972), who argued that the foci have a special status for memory, in that they are remembered more easily even by speakers of languages that do not have separate names for them. However, Rosch’s interpretation of her results has been questioned, and in recent years researches failed to replicate them (Roberson et al. 2005).
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Page 28
