Chapter io 

 ABOUT THE CALENDAR OF THESE INDIANS. 



It can not be doubted but that the calendar is one of the most curious 

 and useful of things and even to some extent necessary to man in 

 order to distinguish him from the brutes and enable him to divide times 

 and ages, and know past happenings, the time which has elapsed since 

 they occurred. 



The calendar of these Indians, if it can be called a Calendar, differs 

 very little or not at all from the natural instinct of brutes. These latter 

 know the times, with their seasons, for their food and procreation, we 

 see many animals at the prescribed time move to another place or 

 even to another climate because of inclemency of weather and lack of 

 food, and when the season arrives return to the same place. These 

 Indians had this same way of doing that the animals had or something 

 very similar, for they had nothing more than the name of the months, 

 which denoted the time or season for gathering the various seeds for 

 their maintenance and the preservation of life. And this matter of the 

 names of the months, all of them did not know, [but] only certain ones 

 of them and these were few. 



What causes wonderment, compassion, and pity is to see creatures 

 endowed like the rest with spiritual souls, created in the image and 

 likeness of God, so rude and so slow that all their activities appear to 

 be mere natural instinct like the brutes, for all their activities are those 

 of cunning for the purpose of deceit, theft, fornication, and other 

 wicked things, but they fall short of attaining to the cunning of the 

 cat, female fox, and female monkey, etc. 



These Indians lacked in the first place a chronology and starting 

 point whereby they could reckon the dates of past years, nor did they 

 have this either in figures or in signs, and therefore their calendar was 

 confined to the months of the year from tropic to tropic, or to the re- 

 turn of the sun, and since their months followed the course of the 

 moon or were counted by the lunations, all their years were lunar, 

 and since lunar years are different from solar years, all the years had 

 vacant days, some years [having] more and others fewer, for when the 

 moon of December was finished, they waited for the return of the 

 sun from the tropic of Capricorn, and began another new year, without 

 remembering what had passed by, and for this reason they did not 



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