Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1895 — Naming Colors. [ARTICLE]

Naming Colors.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has lately published an extract from his autobiography—a work which, he says, is already in print, but is not to be published until after his death. The difficulty and confusion in naming tints and shades led him to write a suggestion which a newspaper correspondence on the subject now induces him to take from that autobiography. He proposes that the tints shall be named on the principle of “boxing the compass;” and to illustrate it he gives a partial list of shades, thus: “Red, red by blue, red red blue, red blue by red, red blue, red blue by blue,” and so forth. The same system is suggested for the slfhdes from blue to yellow, and from yellow to' red. It sounds a little fanciful, but 'Herbert Spencer’s ideas are not to be rejected simply because they are novel and strike one at first as grotesque.