hey
understand."

[284] See Pliny's "Natural History," which gives much
information on the subject.

[285] E. Curtius, "Greek History;" Engl. Trans., i. p.
438; Bluemner's "Technologie," p. 216.

[286] Charpentier "differentiates in every normal eye a
sensibility for light, a sensibility for colour, and a
sensibility for form (a visual sensibility)."--See
"Modern Theories of Colour," _The Lancet_, August 19th,
1882, p. 276. We can perceive, by studying works of art,
how variously these gifts are distributed, or, at any
rate, how differently they are received and acted upon
by individual minds.

[287] The effect of colour on the brain is a subject
only just now beginning to attract attention.
Experiments on the insane have been made in Italy,
especially, I believe, at Venice; and it is said to be
ascertained that red and green are irritants, whereas
windows glazed with blue glass alternating with white
have sensibly calmed the nerves of the patients.

[288] Let us compare the beautiful creations of the
Venetian school with the demoralizing brightness of
aniline colours, or the opaque, earthy tints which some
call beautiful, mistaking their dulness for softness and
sobriety of colouring. But they, too, have their uses.

[289] Black and red are, in ecclesiastical work, the
emblems of mourning.

[290] The Bardic rules in early Britain enjoined three
simple colours: sky blue, the emblem of peace, for the
bard and poet; green, for the master of natural history
and woodcraft; spotless white (the symbol of holiness),
for the priest and Druid.

[291] The blind man said that red was like the sound of
a trumpet, which shows what a soul-stirring colour it
was in his mind's eye.

[292] "Purpura" is supposed to mean crimson velvet. It
came, like "cramoisi," to be a name for a tissue. Fr.
Michell quotes velvet of Vermeil-cramoisi, "violet and
blue cramoisi, and pourpre of divers colours," but he
says he never met with "pourpre blanche." Yule, ed.
1875, i. p. 67. Plano Carpini (p. 755) says the
courtiers of Karakorum were clad in "white purpura;" and
that on the first day of the great festival in honour of
the inauguration of Kuyuk Khan, all the Mogul nobles
were clad in pourpre blanche, the second day in ruby
purple, and the third in bl