The puzzle of color vocabularies.

It was Gladstone 1 who first, in 1S58, called attention to the rather extraordinary vagueness of early color nomenclature.Collating from the Iliad and Odyssey the passages which referred to color, he found such uncertainty and inconsistency in the application of color names as to lead him to deny to the Greeks of Homeric times any clear notions of color whatever."I conclude," he says, "that the organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age."This hypothesis of Gladstone was made more precise and given a definite evolutionary character by Geiger, 2 who, extending the study to many ancient literatures, found them all defective in the same respect; they all showed a lack of any clear term for blue, and the oldest of them had also none for green.Speaking of the Vedas, Geiger says:' " These hymns, consisting of more than 10,000 lines, are nearly all filled with descriptions of the sky.Scarcely any subject is more frequently mentioned; the variety of hues which the sun and dawn display in it, day and night, clouds and lightnings, the atmosphere and the ether, all these are with inexhaustible abundance exhibited to us again and again in all their magnificence; only the fact that the sky is blue could never have been gathered from these poems by any one who did not already know it himself. . . .The Bible, in which, as is equally well known, the sky or heaven plays no less a part, see-1 Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, III., 457-499.