Dear Sir,

I have been much interested by your able argument against the belief that the sense of colour has been recently acquired by man.¹ The following observation bears on this subject.

I attended carefully to the mental developement of my young children, & with two or as I believe three of them, soon after they had come to the age when they knew the names of all common objects, I was startled by observing that they seemed quite incapable of affixing the right names to the colours in coloured engravings, although I tried repeatedly to teach them. I distinctly remember declaring that they were colour blind, but this afterwards proved a groundless fear. On communicating this fact to another person he told me that he had observed a nearly similar case. Therefore the difficulty which young children experience either in distinguishing, or more probably in naming colours, seems to deserve further investigation. I will add that it formerly appeared to me that the gustatory sense, at least in the case of my own infants & very young children, differed from that of grown-up persons: this was shown by their not disliking rhubarb mixed with a little sugar & milk, which is to us abominably nauseous, & in their strong taste for the sourest & most austere fruits such as unripe gooseberries & crab-apples²

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Charles Darwin