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To W. E. Gladstone   2 October 1877

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Oct 2 1877

My dear Sir

As this note requires no answer, I hope that you will excuse my writing to you.

I have just seen your article on Dr Magnus’ view;1 & as you are interested in the subject, you may like to hear that this view has been well criticised under a natural history point of view in a German journal, Kosmos; & that Dr Magnus has answered the criticism in a succeeding number.2

In one of these numbers I have given some facts tending to shew that very young children have great difficulty in distinguishing colours; or as I suspect, of attaching the right names to them, but why this should be so I know not.3 If you would like to see these numbers, & would inform me by a post-card, I should have great pleasure in sending them; but if, as is probable, you have no spare time, I shall understand that this is the case by not hearing from you—

I beg leave to remain with the greatest respect | yours faithfully | Charles Darwin

Footnotes

1
Following the publication of Hugo Magnus’s work on the historic development of colour sense (Magnus 1877a and 1877b), Gladstone had been inspired to undertake further work on colour vocabulary and its usage in Homeric texts. Gladstone’s article was published in the October issue of Nineteenth Century (Gladstone 1877), and supplemented the arguments he had made about colour perception in Gladstone 1858. For more on Gladstone’s and Magnus’s views on colour vision, see Bellmer 1999.
2
Ernst Krause argued that the supposed lack of colour perception by early peoples compared with modern humans was due to deficiencies in their language with respect to naming colours rather than physiological differences (see letter to Ernst Krause, 30 June 1877 and n. 1). His paper was published in the June issue of Kosmos (Krause 1877a). Magnus’s reply to Krause appeared in the July issue (Magnus 1877c). CD’s copies of Kosmos are in the unbound journal collections in the Darwin Library–CUL.
3
A German translation of CD’s ‘Biographical sketch of an infant’ appeared in Kosmos 1 (1877): 367–76 (August issue); Krause added a section on the perception of colour, supplied by CD, at the end of the German version (letter from Ernst Krause, 14 July 1877).

Bibliography

Bellmer, Elizabeth Henry. 1999. The statesman and the ophthalmologist: Gladstone and Magnus on the evolution of human colour vision, one small episode of the nineteeth-century Darwinian debate. Annals of Science 56: 25–45.

‘Biographical sketch of an infant’: A biographical sketch of an infant. By Charles Darwin. Mind 2 (1877): 285–94. [Shorter publications, pp. 409–16.]

Gladstone, William Ewart. 1858. Studies on Homer and the Homeric age. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gladstone, William Ewart. 1877. The colour-sense. Nineteenth Century 2: 366–88.

Summary

Has read WEG’s article ["The colour sense", Nineteenth Century 2 (1877): 366–88] on H. Magnus’ view. Informs him of a criticism of this view and reply by Magnus in Kosmos. Offers to send the article.

CD has contributed some facts on the difficulty children have in distinguishing colours (or naming them correctly).

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-11163
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
William Ewart Gladstone
Sent from
Down
Source of text
The British Library (Add MS 44455: 120–1)
Physical description
LS 3pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 11163,” accessed on 26 September 2022, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-11163.xml

letter

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