BEING
THE TYNDALL LECTURES
DELIVERED IN 1894
AT
THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
BY
CAPT. W. de W. ABNEY, C.B., D.C.L., F.R.S.,
LATE ROYAL ENGINEERS
WITH COLOURED PLATE AND NUMEROUS DIAGRAMS
NEW YORK
WILLIAM WOOD AND COMPANY
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| Preface | vii |
| CHAPTER I. | |
| The Eye | [1] |
| CHAPTER II. | |
| Simple Colours and their Mixture | [15] |
| CHAPTER III. | |
| Three Colour Sensations Possible | [32] |
| CHAPTER IV. | |
| The Young and Hering Theories of Colour Vision | [41] |
| CHAPTER V. | |
| General Aspect of Colour Blindness | [58] |
| CHAPTER VI. | |
| Colour Blindness exhibited by Colour Discs and exhibited by Luminosity Curves of the Spectrum | [74] |
| CHAPTER VII. | |
| Luminosity of Colours to Different Parts of the Retina | [88] |
| CHAPTER VIII. | |
| Luminosity of a Feeble Spectrum and the Limit of the Perception of Colour | [98] |
| CHAPTER IX. | |
| The Extinction of Light from the Spectrum | [108] |
| CHAPTER X. | |
| The Extinction of the Perception of Light by the Colour Blind | [122] |
| CHAPTER XI. | |
| Tobacco Blindness | [137] |
| CHAPTER XII. | |
| Examples of Colour Blindness due to Disease | [148] |
| CHAPTER XIII. | |
| The Holmgren Test for Colour Blindness | [167] |
| CHAPTER XIV. | |
| The Spectrum Test for Colour Blindness | [180] |
| CHAPTER XV. | |
| The Young and Hering Theories of Colour Vision Compared | [187] |
| Appendix | [201] |
| Index | [229] |
PREFACE.
The writer had for some years past, in conjunction with General Festing, and recently as Secretary and Member of the Colour Vision Committee of the Royal Society, carried out a series of investigations on colour vision, and selected that subject when he was invited, in 1894, to deliver the Tyndall Lectures at the Royal Institution.
The brief time allotted for these lectures—an hour on three successive Saturday afternoons—restricted the discussion of some aspects of the question, and confined its treatment in the main to those features most readily explicable by the physicist, and to bringing into notice the latest results which had been obtained from physical experiments. How far the writer has succeeded in the task which he then outlined it is for the reader to determine.