236 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



There are annuals and perennials there, as elsewhere. Each kind 

 has its month for sprouting, for flowering, for fruiting, for shedding 

 its seed; and men in the tropics, some of them long isolated in oce- 

 anic islands, or in great insulated regions like Australia or New 

 Guinea, from the rest of their kind in the temperate regions, never- 

 theless know and observe the year, and perform all their functions, 

 agricultural or religious, by yearly cycles. For example, there is 

 among them all an annual feast for the dead, and widows mourn 

 their husbands for one year from their burial. Observation of the 

 year, therefore, both automatically by organisms at large and con- 

 sciously by man, antedates and is independent of observation of the 

 existence of summer or winter. 



I do not think, however, that man would have noted the merely 

 astronomical year — the year of the sun's position — at least till a 

 relatively late stage in culture, if he had not first noticed the organic 

 year — the regular recurrence of plant and animal seasons. So many 

 yams — that is to say, so many yam harvests — in other words, so many 

 years, is a common savage way of reckoning times and ages. But 

 they call it " yams," not summers or winters. And when I say 

 yams, I give that merely as a single instance, for elsewhere the " seed- 

 time and harvest " are reckoned indifferently in maize or millet, rice 

 or barley, according to the agriculture of the particular people. 

 Even hunting races know that at certain times of year certain foods 

 abound; and this is true of equatorial savages and equatorial plants 

 or animals, as well as of others. 



Moons are more obvious measures of time than suns, in the 

 tropics at least — probably everywhere; for the waxing and waning 

 of the moon mean much to people who live largely out of doors; 

 and the month is, perhaps, the earliest fixed mode of reckoning time 

 beyond a day or two. Most savages count time mainly by so many 

 moons. But they must also have noticed early that after a certain 

 number of moons (usually about thirteen), certain fruits or seeds 

 were ripe again; especially must they have noticed it when this 

 recurrence coincided with the return of the rainy season, or of some 

 other annual meteorological phenomenon, like the bursting of the 

 monsoon or the Nile inundation. Thus, even in the tropics, and be- 

 fore the coming on of the Glacial epoch, men or the ancestors of men 

 (one can not draw precise lines here) must probably have observed a 

 certain rough relation between the months and the vegetative cycles; 

 after so many moons, about say thirteen, the yam, or the mangoes, 

 or the grains are ripe again. These organic years, I take it, must 

 have been noticed before the astronomical ones. For it is now be- 

 ginning; to be more and more believed that man is of preglacial 

 origin; and even if something worth calling a man were not, then 



