personalising habit, probably one of the most powerful is the instinct of expression-reading-the well-organised power which all men seem to possess of interpreting human looks and gestures. To this faculty Anthropomorphism gives unconscious exercise. We may perceive how automatically it comes into play, on reflecting how apt we are to discover in lifeless things the semblance of human features.

Whether these suggestions give ground sufficient for a theory of the genesis of all Anthropomorphism and Vitalism can only be determined by further investigation. We may hope in time to understand primitive thought much better than we do at present, for it has a logic of its own, and though very unreasonable is not irrational.*

A. C. OUGHTER LONIE.

This Note was in type some months ago, but at the last had to be left over from No. VIII. Even if it had appeared in October, its author (as I afterwards learned) would not have seen it, for he had died some weeks before. Mr. Oughter Lonie, whose life was thus cut short, after a lingering illness, at the age of 26, had been a very distinguished student of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, whence he passed to Edinburgh to make a special study of geology. A career as a practical geologist was opened for him, but he preferred to return to the field of philosophical work.

In the new edition of

the Encyclopædia Britannica he wrote the article on 'Animism,' and the remarks appended to its expository part give evidence of a power of thinking that might have come to much. All those who knew him speak with admiration of his intellect and character, and his untimely fate has blasted many hopes.

EDITOR.

Development of the Sense of Colour.-In the October number of the XIXth Century Mr. Gladstone has an interesting and very learned paper on the Colour-Sense, in which he endeavours to prove that the Homeric Akhaians had little or no perception of colours as such, but merely a power of distinguishing light and shade. This view appears to me extremely untenable, and I hope at some future time to give reasons on the other side at greater length. Meanwhile, I seize the opportunity kindly accorded me by the Editor of MIND to summarise with necessary brevity the arguments which may be offered against it. 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. The facts of mimicry, often minutely faithful in every line, spot, hue, and shade- —as abundantly illustrated by Messrs. Darwin and Wallace-point in the same direction for such careful imitation would have been useless unless it aided the mimicking organism in eluding the vigilance of enemies. To come to specific cases, Sir John Lubbock's experiments show clearly that the social insects have a colour-sense essentially identical with our

own while some special instances of their discriminativeness in flowers go far to prove an intensely accurate power of perception. Amongst vertebrates, birds and mammals give many signs of considerable colour-sense, as witness the antipathy of male ruminants to the sight of scarlet, and the readiness with which birds distinguish fruits, &c. How otherwise could we explain the very definite and gorgeously-arranged colours of the peacock, the argus-pheasant, and the mandril? Even among reptiles, Kühne has recently shown * that frogs (unless blinded) exhibit a preference for blue over green glass, special care being taken to exclude all possibility of error through differences of diathermancy, &c.; and it is noticeable that these two colours are the very ones which Mr. Gladstone looks upon as the last to be discriminated. Finally, in the eyes of nocturnal vertebrates, such as owls and bats, we find an absence of certain structures (the cones) which are held to be the organs for the perception of colour, and a presence of certain others only (the rods), which are held to be those for the perception of light and shade alone. But in man and most other mammals, both sets of organs are found, and I believe the nature of their separate functions has seldom been doubted. From these various cases (only briefly selected out of hundreds that might be alleged) we are justified in concluding that the colour-sense is a faculty far more ancient than the development of man, and not (as Mr. Gladstone argues) one but lately evolved.

Again, if we look at the various races of men-since Mr. Gladstone would probably refuse to accept an argument drawn from Darwinism -we shall find very low types of humanity possessing a colour-sense far more acute than that which Mr. Gladstone assigns to the semicivilised Homeric Akhaians. My own observations on negroes (made in order to test Mr. Gladstone's earlier utterances on the same subject) convinced me that they possess exactly the same sensations in this matter as the ordinary European. They can distinguish in just the same way between primaries, secondaries, and even more delicate hues. A visit to the Ethnological Room at the British Museum will show that the Polynesians, North American Indians, Mexicans, and Peruvians, have or had the power to distinguish red, yellow, green, and blue. Furthermore,. to go back in time, the Egyptian wallpaintings, papyri, mummy-cases, &c., are decorated with an infinite number of shades and mixed colours, which reach their highest development under the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties (surely quite early enough for Mr. Gladstone), and become less intense and varied at a later date. Among them, the greens, blues, yellows, and their compounds, are especially noticeable for their delicacy and variety. As to the beads, they are almost as beautiful and diversified as those now manufactured for the Central African trade. I think nobody can look at the Egyptian remains in the British Museum-still less at the great collections of fac-similes-without recognising not only colour-perception in a high degree, but also remarkable taste in blend

* Untersuch. aus dem Physiolog. Inst. in Heidelberg, Band i., Heft 2.

ing and delicacy of hue. On the other hand, chiaroscuro is totally wanting; so that, if we were to argue from the single case of Egyptian painting, as Mr. Gladstone has argued from the single case of Homeric poetry, we might arrive at the diametrically opposite conclusion, that early man possessed a developed colour-sense, but no perception of light and shade.

:

How then are we to explain the singular fact, which Mr. Gladstone undoubtedly succeeds in proving, that the Homeric ballads contain few actual colour-epithets? In the following manner, it seems to me. Language is at any time an index of the needs of intercommunication, not of the abstract perceptions, of those who use it. Now, in nature, the bright-coloured objects are chiefly flowers, fruits, birds, butterflies, autumn leaves, and other organic products, of little practical importance to the Akhaian warrior. The objects which he needs to describe are earth, sky, clouds, sea, men, arms, cattle; all of them indefinitely coloured, and many of them liable to great changes in light and shade, or great variations between individuals. Hence the need for colour-terms does not practically arise. Again, the growth. of colour-terminology seems to me to be greatly dependent upon the art of dyeing, and the consequent use of pigments for human decoration. In our own time, such colours as mauve, magenta, solferino, écru, &c., only come to have names as fashion introduces them into dress and the vocabulary of artists, house-painters, milliners, and drapers, is much richer in colour-terms than that of ordinary Europeans. So the two words which most express colour in the Homeric ballads are those which refer to the dye of the Tyrian murex and the so-called vermilion. Both of these were probably more or less reddish; and we know from modern experience that reds and purples are the colours which children and savages most admire. I have tried elsewhere to account for this preference: it is sufficient here to note that red seems everywhere the earliest colour used for decorative purposes. On the whole, I think we may conclude that while a loose chromatic sense is to be attached to two or three Homeric words, the majority of visual epithets occurring in the ballads are to be accepted as referring to light and shade alone; because the need for colourterms was not yet felt among a race of non-manufacturing warriors, and because the gleam of bronze, the light of day, the bright or lowering sky, the indefinite hues of man and horse and cattle, were far more relatively important than the pure tints of flowers and insects, or the almost unknown art-products of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Assyria. As for the range of Homeric colour-epithets, I think it sufficient to note that we ourselves talk of a red sky, red wine, red bricks, a red cow, red lips and red Indians; or of blue heavens, blue. sea, blue eyes, blue frock-coats and blue slate.

It will be obvious that I have only given such principal headings as seem indispensable, and have been precluded froin further illustration by want of space. But the three points I have tried to make out are briefly these; (1) That colour-perception is a common possession of men and animals; (2) That it is therefore, a fortiori, a

common possession of all normally-developed men; (3) That the want of colour-epithets in the Homeric poems is due to a defect of language rather than of perception, such as might naturally be expected from the circumstances of their authors. As to the existence and personality of a Homer, that is quite outside the present question.* GRANT ALLEN.

A short notice of the two tracts, by Dr. H. Magnus of Breslau, which called forth Mr. Gladstone's recent utterance on the subject, will be found below under the head of New Books. Prof. Robertson Smith, in a letter that appeared in Nature of Dec. 6th, gives brief expression to a view of the question essentially the same as Mr. Allen's (whose Note was independently written some weeks before), and cites a most interesting passage from Athenaeus, Deipnos. xiii., 81, which proves that the Greeks themselves were perfectly well aware of the looseness of their poetic vocabulary of colour.

EDITOR.

"Transposition of Traces of Experience."-To the process thus aptly designated Mr. Verdon devotes a short paragraph in his valuable article on "Forgetfulness" in the last number of MIND. In each instance of its occurrence, as there represented, we find involved two objects of memory,-(1) a pair of words, syllables, or sounds, and (2) their order in a sentence. The former of these, viewed independently, are supposed to be perfectly well remembered: failure of memory exhibits itself only in respect of the latter. The writer adds that "the whole family of Malapropisms is nurtured upon this peculiarity". Now this general statement may or may not be true in its fullest extent; but before we admit its truth, we must at any rate examine many other typical examples of transposition than those of the exact kind indicated by Mr. Verdon.

At the outset, 'Malapropism' may be referred to a more general 'Maladroitism,' which brings dumb actions within our purview. In fact, the transposition of these is often more striking, and sometimes more amusing, than that of words. Thus a man shall, like Will Honeycomb, be standing by a river-side with his watch in one hand and a pebble in the other: he shall "squirr away his watch" into the water, and shall ("with great sedateness") pocket the pebble. Here the two familiar actions transposed correspond to the two remembered words above referred to, and just as these may be accurately spoken, so may those be accurately performed. But here, and generally, the order of combination is totally new,-an arrangement proposed, and not formerly learnt. How far, then, and in what sense, is a perturbation of that order chargeable upon failure of memory? Shall we say that an order of procedure is directed by the mind and instantaneously forgotten? or is, perchance, the apparently perturbed order of procedure the one actually directed, while forgetfulness relates to the - positions of the objects,-it being momentarily forgotten that the watch lies (say) in the right hand, and the pebble in the left? And

what, if those positions have not been accurately perceived? Can that be, strictly speaking, forgotten which has never really been apprehended?

În a certain sense, indeed, we may be said to forget everything but the object on which the mind is, at each successive instant, actually fixed; nevertheless mistakes that fall within the present moment (this being understood to correspond with a material rather than a mathematical point) are generally charged upon want of attention. It would seem sometimes, as if the mind, after directing the performance of two actions, instead of superintending the performance, leaves the limbs to act, so to say, automatically; and these excite that action first which, from a nerve-and-muscle point of view, is the more important, or to which the more energetic impulse has been given. Or, again, the operations of the mind being much more rapid than the movements of its material agents, these-the limb, the tongue, the pen-necessarily lag behind, and are continually trying, as it were, to catch it up by leaping to that point in the line of thought to which the mind has preceded them; while the mind is as continually running back to bring them up abreast of itself. When these two movements occur simultaneously the result is some more or less grotesque transposition.

Hence, a general condition of complete interchange of two such actions, words, or what not, is that they fall pretty close together,close, ie., in time. If hand or tongue lags behind by any long interval, the mind, in reverting to its agent, usually discovers, and if possible rectifies, the first mistake, or at any rate prevents the perpetration of the counterbalancing one. This is nearly always the case in the comparatively slow process of writing. In a rapid succession of actions, moreover, the attention may be forcibly recalled by the oddity or physical effects of the first mistake. Thus, a friend of mine, dressing in great haste, and intending to use his shaving-brush and tooth-brush in succession, dashed the former vigorously into his mouth. Need it be added that he did not apply the other to his chin?

But this uncompleted interchange must, in the case of words, be discriminated from a species of Malapropism in which no interchange is either intended or possible; as e.g., when Mrs. Malaprop herself talks of the burning lather running down Mount Vociferous. Here we step over our bounds into the region of what the Germans call Volksetymologie, and find ourselves among linguistic phenomena of the "sparrow-grass" type. A foreign or strange word (never correctly apprehended) is assimilated to a native or familiar one; and then some absurd reason is invented for the special application of the latter.

But purely phonetic interchanges may certainly be embraced under the general process. These, although curtly dismissed by Mr. Verdon, are perhaps more interesting and linguistically important than any others. The accidental slips (for example, with their h's), to which the best-educated people are liable, are indeed mere trifles, and are