the following colours,—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet,—Dalton could only see yellow, blue, and violet. Rose-colour by day appeared to him a pale blue, but at night it seemed to take an orange hue. By day crimson seemed to be dirty blue, and red cloth dark blue. Dr. Whewell having asked him one day to describe the colour of the doctor's scarlet gown, Dalton pointed to the trees around them, and declared he could distinguish no difference in their colour; and one day having dropped a stick of red sealing-wax in the grass, he had the greatest difficulty in finding it again. Since Dalton's time over five hundred distinctly marked instances of this imperfection have been noticed, and Professor Prévost, of Geneva, has named it Daltonism, an extremely unphilosophical piece of pathological nomenclature, which has unfortunately received the sanction of too many great physiologists to be abolished. Blindness might just as well be called Homerism or Miltonism.
Colour-blindness is much more frequent than is generally supposed, for those who are afflicted with it are mostly ignorant of the defect, and frequently practise trades or professions in which perfect sensibility to the different hues of colour is quite indispensable. An instance of this occurred some time since in the case of an engine-driver, who allowed his engine to run into a luggage train, through not noticing the red danger signal. At his examination it was proved that he was colour-blind, and could not distinguish red from green. Partial colour-blindness is, no doubt, the cause of the frequent disputes that we hear about the tints of certain objects; to say nothing of the glaring instances of bad taste in the arrangement of colour that are now-a-days so common. Out of forty boys at a school at Berlin who were examined by Leebech, he found five who were quite confused in their notions of colour, and
