Sinne von blau genant, sonder seine Blaue [wird] ganzlich verschwiegen, und ohne Zweifel geschieht dies weil dieselbe [die Blaue] nicht unmittelbar mit dem Dunkel verwechselt werden konnte… Reizend ist es sodann, das Ringen eines unklaren, der Sprache und Vernunft uberall um einige wenige Schritte vorauseilenden Gefuhles zu beobachten, wie es… hie und da blo zufallig einen mehr oder weniger nahe kommenden Ausdruck leiht.”
Lagerlunda crash: Olsen 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.,
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
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
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 Kurfurstendamm: 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: Slobodin 1978.
“goodbye my friend-I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again”: Whittle 1997.
“Galileo of anthropology”: Levi-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.
