Color-blindness : its dangers and its detection / by B. Joy Jeffries.

  • Benjamin Joy Jeffries
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Color-blindness : its dangers and its detection / by B. Joy Jeffries. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    near it. It resembled a red soil just turned up by tbe plough. When this kind of cloth loses its color, as other people say, and turns yellow, then it appears to me a pleasant green. Very light- green paper, silk, &c., is white to me. Blue was the same to him as to other people, both by day- light and candle-light. Colors appear to me much the same by moonlight as they do by can- dle-light. By lightning and the electric light they appear as by daylight. A light-drab woollen cloth seems to resemble a light green by day. My idea of brown I obtain from a piece of white paper heated almost to ignition. This color by daylight seems to have a great affinity to green. Browns seem to me very diversified: some I should call red. Dark-brown woollen cloth I should call black. A most amusing account was given by Babbage of the incidents attending the presentation of Dal- ton at court: — Firstly he was a Quaker, and would not wear the sword, which is an indispensable appendage of ordinary court-dress. Secondly, the robe of a doctor of civil laws was known to be objectionable on account of its color,— scarlet, —one forbidden to Quakers. Luckily it was recol- lected that Dalton was afflicted with .the peculiar color- blindness which bears his name, and that, as the cherries and the leaves of a cherry-tree were to him of the same color, the scarlet gown would present to him no extraordi- nary appearance. So perfect, indeed, was the color-blind- ness, that this most modest and simple of men, after having received the doctor's gown at Oxford, actually wore it for several days in happy unconsciousness of the effect he pro- duced on the street. — Scientific London, 1874, p. 38. Professor Whewell reports having asked Dalton what the bright-scarlet gown which he wore
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