Mr. Havelock Ellis has made (Contemporary Review, May) an interesting study of the color terms used by imaginative writers, which is a real contribution to scientific aesthetics. The fact that the Greeks did not name green and blue does not, of course, indicate (as Mr. Gladstone and others have alleged) that they could not see the more refrangible rays of the spectrum, but it does show a lack of interest in these colors. Mr. Ellis' statistics are given in the annexed table, the number of times each of the colors is used by the author in selected passages being reduced to percentages.

Mr. Ellis makes a number of acute psychological and literary suggestions and concludes that a numerical study of color vision "possesses at least two uses in the precise study of literature. It is, first, an instrument for investigating a writer's personal psychology, by defining the nature of his aesthetic color vision. When we have ascertained a writer's color formula and his colors of prediction we can tell at a glance, simply and reliably, something about his view of the world which pages of description could only tell us with uncertainty. In the second place, it enables us to take a definite step in the attainment of a scientific aesthetic, by furnishing a means of comparative study. By its help we can trace the colors of the world as mirrored in literature from age to age, from country to country, and in finer shades among the writers of a single group. At least one broad and unexpected conclusion may be gathered from the tables here presented. Many foolish things have been written about the 'degeneration' of latter-day art. It is easier to dogmatize when you think that you are safe from the evidence of precise tests. But here is a reasonably precise test. And the evidence of this test, at all events, by no means furnishes support for the theory of decadence.

On the contrary, it shows that the decadence, if anywhere, was at the end of the last century, and that our own vision of the world is fairly one with that of classic times, with Chaucer's and with Shakespeare's. At the end of the nineteenth century we can say this for the first time since Shakespeare died." - Science.