Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 219, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 September 1915 — SOME FACTS AS TO COLORS [ARTICLE]

SOME FACTS AS TO COLORS

Good Reason for the Objection, That Is So Popular, About Bad Odor of Yellow. A certain significance has always attached to the different colors. We see the usually accepted meaning of the various hues of the rainbow beautifully exemplified In the paintings of the Italian masters, who draped their Madonnas in blue and in red, to signify purity and love. Blue —purity —was without a doubt derived from the color of the heavens, and red —love —from the color of the flame. Purple, a mixture of red and blue, since time immemorial, was the insignia of royalty, and green was and is the color of envy. What a “yellow streak” means needs hardly be explained. It remains to be seen how yellow came to be in bad odor. In all nature, particularly in tropical countries, it is a notorious fact that the brightly colored flowers and Insects are poisonous or ill-tasting, or both. Oftener than not these brightly hued poison-plants are .yellow. It is the color of belladonna, of many particularly malignant toad*

stools and of innumerable insects whose bite is dangerous. The salamander, obnoxious to the nose, is streaked with yellow. This curious animal possesses glands which excrete a secretion which becomes enormously large when the glands are suojected co Intense heat. In this way the salamander can sustain life in the open fire during an unbelievably long period. We see that the figurative sense in which we use the expression, “yellow streak,” is founded on solid facts in natural history, where the “bad odor” is an actual thing.