Abstract
I Hope your readers will bear with a few more observations from me on the foregoing subject. It is an undoubted fact that modes of nervous action which have once coexisted tend to excite each other afterwards. This the phenomenon known as Association of Ideas sufficiently proves. It is to this cause that I should be disposed to attribute the phenomenon of accidental or complementary colours. I do not, of course, mean that this latter fact can be resolved into Association of ideas, but that it and association depend on the same organic law. It is probable that in addition to this, however, the mutual excitation of vibrations comes in. Judging from the determination of wave-lengths by diffraction, the ratio of the wave-length of any given ray to that of the complementary one is not very far from 2 to 3 or 3 to 2; and, as the colours excited do not seem to be exactly complementary, it is probable that the vibration referred to is that chiefly excited. For an accurate determination of this question we should require to determine the wave-lengths for each colour in the liquid which surrounds the eye, or rather, perhaps, in the retinal substance. Such are the two causes to which I should be disposed to ascribe the phenomenon of accidental colours. From the former it would follow that the more completely the eye had been accustomed to white light, the more likely the person would be to become colour-blind; and that colour-blindness might be remedied, or at least altered in character, by accustoming the eye to look at everything through coloured glasses.
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MONCK, W. Colour Blindness. Nature 2, 452 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/002452a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/002452a0
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