Researches in Colour Vision and the Trichromatic Theory

THERE is certainly no living authority on “colour-vision” more competent to throw light on that intricate and perplexing subject than the author of this work. Sir William Abney has attacked the various problems which present themselves by his own methods and with the utmost completeness of detail. In almost every conceivable way he has tried to correlate the more precise physical facts, elicited by carefully and ingeniously modified experiments, with the vaguer physiological conceptions arrived at from a study of normal and abnormal sensations of colour. The present work embodies and collects into a consecutive whole a record of the author's previously published researches. The book is consequently one which will be regarded as a standard work. It gives the most complete and clear exposition of the trichromatic theory of Young-Helmholtz. It will, we venture to think, be more readily understood than Helmholtzs own latest treatment of the subject as given in the last edition of his “Physiological Optics.”Researches in Colour Vision and the Trichromatic Theory.By Sir William de W. Abney Pp. xi + 418 + 5 plates. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913.) Price 21s. net.