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1. Introduction

Correlations among the properties of elliptical galaxies have been used both as measures of their homogeneity as a population and as indicators of the distances of individual galaxies. The discovery of a color–magnitude effect (Baum 1959) was followed by the measurement of relative distances of galaxies and clusters using the color–magnitude relation (Sandage 1972; Visvanathan & Sandage 1977; Sandage & Visvanathan 1978a,b). The relation’s small scatter was used as a constraint on elliptical galaxy formation time-scales (Bower, Lucey, & Ellis 1992). The correlation between luminosity and velocity dispersion (Faber & Jackson 1976) was likewise used as a distance indicator (Tonry & Davis 1981; Dressler 1984), but Terlevich et al. (1981) discovered a weak correlation between the residuals of the relation and Mg2, implying that there might b