Curiosities of Science, Past and Present / A Book for Old and Young

by John Timbs

COLOURS AND TINTS.

M. Chevreul, the Directeur des Gobelins, has presented to the French Academy a plan for a universal chromatic scale, and a methodical classification of all imaginable colours. Mayer, a professor at Göttingen, calculated that the different combinations of primitive colours produced 819 different tints; but M. Chevreul established not less than 14,424, all very distinct and easily recognised,—all of course proceeding from the three primitive simple colours of the solar spectrum, red, yellow, and blue. For example, he states that in the violet there are twenty-eight colours, and in the dahlia forty-two.