230 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE SEASON OF THE YEAE. 



By GKANT ALLEN. 



A YEAR is, roughly speaking, the period which it takes the earth 

 to perform one complete revolution round the sun. I say 

 u roughly speaking " with due humility, having the fear of the ex- 

 pert ever before my eyes, because I know that if I do not sing 

 small, that inconvenient person, the astronomical critic, will come 

 down upon me at once like a wolf on the fold, with minute dis- 

 tinctions about the mean, the tropical, and the sidereal year; matters 

 of immense importance at Greenwich Observatory, no doubt, but 

 elsewhere of very little interest indeed, seeing that they differ from 

 one another by so many minutes only. Let us leave the astronomers 

 their own problems. The year with which I am going to deal hum- 

 bly here is a much more commonplace, ordinary, and comprehensible 

 year — the visible year of vegetation, of plant and animal life, of the 

 four seasons; the year as roughly known to children and savages, 

 and to the weeds, the flowers, the bees, and the squirrels. 



It has often struck me as curious that people took this complex 

 concept of the year so much for granted- — inquired so little into its 

 origin and discovery. Yet it is by no means everywhere obvious. 

 How did men first come to notice, in the tropics especially, that 

 there was such a thing as the year at all? How did they first observe, 

 save in our frozen north, any fixed sequence or order in the succes- 

 sion of Nature? How did they learn, even here, that spring would 

 infallibly follow winter, and summer be succeeded in due course by 

 autumn? And, to go a step farther back, how did the plants and 

 animals, in all parts of the world alike, come originally to discover 

 and adapt themselves to all these things? How did the bee know 

 that she must " gather honey all the day from every opening flower," 

 the summer through, in order to use it up as bodily fuel in winter? 

 How did the plants learn when to blossom and produce seed? In 

 one word, how did the seasons come to be automatically recog- 

 nized? 



That they are automatically recognized, even by plants, quite 

 apart from the stimulus of heat or cold, drought or rain, a single 

 fact (out of many like it) will sufficiently prove. Trees brought 

 from Australia to England, where the seasons are reversed, try for 

 two or three years to put forth leaves and flowers in October or 

 November — the southern spring. It takes them several autumns 

 before they learn that the year has been turned upside down — that 

 June is now summer and December winter. This shows that life 

 moves in regular cycles, adapted to the seasons, but not directly de- 



