ith that accessible to sound--the
plight of the blind in contrast to that of the deaf--there is the same
discrepancy; the field of the eye is immensely richer, more various
and more interesting than that of the ear.

The difficulty appears to consist in the inferior impressionability
of the eye to its particular order of beauty. To the average man
color--as color--has nothing significant to say: to him grass is
green, snow is white, the sky blue; and to have his attention drawn to
the fact that sometimes grass is yellow, snow blue, and the sky green,
is disconcerting rather than illuminating. It is only when his retina
is assaulted by some splendid sunset or sky-encircling rainbow that
he is able to disassociate the idea of color from that of form and
substance. Even the artist is at a disadvantage in this respect, when
compared with the musician. Nothing in color knowledge and analysis
analogous to the established laws of musical harmony is part of the
equipment of the average artist; he plays, as it were, by ear. The
scientist, on the other hand, though he may know the spectrum from
end to end, and its innumerable modifications, values this "rainbow
promise of the Lord" not for its own beautiful sake but as a means
to other ends than those of beauty. But just as the art of music
has developed the ear into a fine and sensitive instrument of
appreciation, so an analogous art of light would educate the eye to
nuances of color to which it is now blind.

[Illustration: PLATE XIV. SONG AND LIGHT: AN APPROACH TOWARD "COLOR
MUSIC"]

It is interesting to speculate as to the particular form in which this
new art will manifest itself. The question is perhaps already answered
in the "color organ," the earliest of which was Bambridge Bishop's,
exhibited at the old Barnum's Museum--before the days of electric
light--and the latest A.W. Rimington's. Both of these instruments were
built upon a supposed correspondence between a given scale of colors,
and the musical chromatic scale; they were played from a musical score
upon an organ keyboard. This is sufficiently easy and sufficiently
obvious, and has been done, with varying success in one way or
another, time and again, but its very ease and obviousness should give
us pause.

It may well be questioned whether any arbitrary and literal
translation, even though practicable, of a highly complex, intensely
mobile art, unfolding in time, as does music, into a correspondent
light an