THE CAT'S WORLD.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1420, 25 October 1923, Page 6

THE CAT'S WORLD.

Did you ever try to invent or imagine an entirely new colour? (asks Ernest Brennecke in The World Magazine). A colour that no one has ever yet. seen? A colour that is not in the spectrum, one that is neither white nor black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, nor purple, nor any combination or shade of these? You cannot unless your eyes and mind are millions of years ahead of the present development of the human race. We have so few colours, after all! By mixing and blending four real colour tones with each other and with black ami white we can produce every variety of which it is possible to conceive. Are there really no more colours in the world? Will we perhaps in time, as our evolve greater and greater powers, also see new colours of which no one can even dream to-day? These questions may not seem too fantastic or utterly stupid if we try to put ourselves for a few moments in the place of certain ani-

mals whose optical sense is not so highly developed as our own. Take, for instance, the common household or alley cat. Now a cat sees no colours at all; it lives in a world of black and white, in a world of colourless motion pictures. To a cat. the brightest red looks a dull white, and cannot be distinguished from fairly bright green; blue and purple look equally grey, and very dark red looks black. Imagine, now, that a cat could reason and talk with you as a human being—and try to tell the cat about the colours you see; try merely to explain what blue is. It is impossible. It is not entirely beyond reason, then, to imagine that there may be colours to which we are still "as blind as a cat." Much light has been thrown over the whole fascinating problem of our Strange sense of colour by the work of Prof. Christine Ladd-Frank-liii, of Columbia University, who advances a most ingenious theory—a theory whose implications are most extraordnary, although based on the keenest scientific logic. She calls attention to some wonderful experiments with the vision of animals, particularly those which Prof. K. von Frisch. of Munich, carried on with bees lome time ago. ''What colours do bees see?" asked von Fisch, and proceeded to find the answer in the following manner:-—ln an open air \ aviary, he coated certain blue ob- j jects with a sweet substance; gray j objects of 32 different shades he left | uncoated. The bees naturally flock- : ed to the sweets. Then he introduced into the aviary additional blue and | grey objects, all uncoated. The bees ' all docked towards the blue (now, i however, without sweetness) and still left the grey untouched. Thus two or three days' training was sufficient j to enable many hundreds of bees to j form this association :^~ Whatever is j blue is sweet; whatever is grey is j not sweet. In the same manner they j

were able to learn later that yellow indicated sweetness. No amount of training, however, (they were tried for 10 days) could teach them to disr tinguish between red and black.