Nov., 1913 A PRACTICAL SYSTEM OF COLOR DESIGNATION 215 readily understood the thought. But words not only symbolize experiences: they indicate relationships; they point out the way to other experiences. If they re- late themselves to common experience, they become intelligible, even though the experience connoted by the word itself is a new one. Words must either re- cord common experience, or point out the way to such experience, or remain unintelligible. Now this is the trouble with color.names, even those employed in Ridgway's new Nomenclature of Color. They do not appeal to common experience. They are so recondite or so arbitrary, or so fanciful as to be incommunicable, save to specialists as highly trained as Ridgway himself. 'l'hey are not only meaning- less to such as do not possess the "key," they are so unrelated in thought that they can be found or re-found in the book itelf only by constant reference to the index. Thus, "Hermosa Pink" is in the red series; "Bittersweet Pink" in the orange series; "Phlox Pink" in the violet series, etc. "Chatanay Pink" crops up in the gray-toned tint of Scarlet-red; and "Tourmaline Pink '? among the double- gray-toned tints of Rhodamine Purple. Pink does suggest redness, so that one does not need to hunt outside of the twelve hues between Violet-Red and Red- Orange; but here are several hundred possibilities; and it will puzzle the student to find, save through the index, Patent Blue or Acetin Blue or Corydalis Green or Mytho Green or Asphodel Green, even with the basic hue named outright. 'Phese names may be found to be exact when you have arrived, but there is nothing about them which points the way to the inquirer. Such names do not appeal to common experience, and they contain only the smallest suggestions of relationship. It is quite conceivable that a student, preferably a younger one, should mem- orize this entire list, should master it so that he could recognize and name a color at sight; but even so his report would be unintelligible to any one else who had not similarly mastered this Chinese alphabet of color. He would still require color terms by which it would be possible to communicate his impressions to the general reader. If this is ever to be done the basic names of color nomenclature must be simplified in character and reduced to the lowest terms, and all other color names must be so constructed as to point clearly to the nearest base. This is no easy mat- ter. Perhaps it cannot be done. Perhaps, however perfectly done, the public would not stand for it, any more than they would have stood for Volapfik or Esperanto or the other honest attempts to provide a universal language. But unless it is done, technical descriptions , as of bird plumage, couched in the color terms of the new key, will remain in sealed books. I have no such ideal system to propose. That is a matter which might well engage the profound attention of influential learned bodies. Doubtless, no one is more conscious of this fundamental requirement of color nomenclature than Mr. Ridgway himself, but he xvas too modest to advocate such a sweep;ng change. Nevertheless, he has pointed out one way, through the 'use of descrip- tive adjectives where established names were lacking--ideally in the case of Neutral Gray, whose successively diminishing tints are designated as light neu- tral gray, pale neutral gray, and pallid neutral gray; and whose deepening shades are deep neutral gray, dark neutral gray, and dusky neutral gray. This suf- fices when we wish to refer to a norm only three points away, but it would break down of sheer cumbersomeness if we wished to refer back through successive gray dilutions to the normative hue. But some way must be found around the difficulty--for thought, if not for printed description. Because of this necessity I am emboldened to describe my own
