Why things have different colors explained.
If you have pieces of glass, and let the light come through them, you see the same thing in another way. Light coming through blue glass comes to your eye blue, because all the other colors stop in the glass, while the blue passes on; and light coming through green glass is green for the same reason.
Now what is done with the colors that stay in things that they come to we do not know. If a thing looks blue, only one color out of the whole seven in the light is thrown off from it. The other six colors, red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, and violet, stop right there in the thing. What it does with them is a mystery. It puts them out of sight in some way, and sends only one of the seven colors to our eyes.
Questions.—What makes the color of the sun’s light white? How many colors are there in a ray of the sun? Mention Sir Isaac Newton’s experiment. Tell what is represented by the figure. What does the glass prism do to the light? Tell about the colors of the scattered ice. How is the rainbow formed? Tell about the colors in the dew. When is a thing white? When is a thing black? Tell about Newton’s painted wheel. Tell about his mixture of powders. Explain how it is that one thing is blue, another green, another yellow, etc. How is it when light comes through things, as colored pieces of glass? What is said about the parts of the light that are not reflected by things that we see?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
MORE ABOUT COLOR.
How color is made.
You see that the color of a thing is not a part of the thing itself. It is something which the thing throws off or lets pass through it. The color of a thing depends upon what a thing will do to the light when the light comes to it. It has no color in the dark. Its color is made out of the light that shines on it.
Color not a fixed thing shown in various ways.
Color is something that is made every moment. The color that you see now in any thing is made now, out of the light that is shining. If a piece of cloth looks blue to you, it makes the blue color out of the light while you are looking at it. The dyer did not really make the color. The dye that he put it into altered the cloth so that it would make a blue color go to your eye from the light that comes to the cloth.