Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/251

Rh at least man's pre-human ancestors go back far into the Tertiary period. Only later would men begin to note that some thirteen moons, and the recurrence of a food stuff, concurred with a particular solar season.

Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much even now do any of us, save the most scientific, mean by the year, beyond the visible change of summer and winter? What we are thinking of is the leafless trees, the ice and snow, the green grass in spring, the flowers and warm days in summer, not the abstract astronomical fact of the earth's revolution round the sun, or the due succession of the signs of the zodiac. It is that visible organic year that must have counted most with man from the first; though no doubt its meaning and reality are much more vividly present since the coming on of the Glacial epoch, and the more so in proportion as we live nearer to the north or south pole; while at the equator the year is to the last a much more inconspicuous period—a largely artificial mode of reckoning.

Still, from the very first, there was one element of diversity in the year which must have struck all men, in the temperate and frigid zones at least, perhaps even in a certain way in the tropics. I mean, the varying length of the day, always perceptible in the frigid and temperate zones; for as soon as men in these regions began to think and to observe at all, they must have noticed that the days increased in their summer and lessened in their winter; and they must have learned to correlate this waxing and waning of the day with the appearance or abundance of certain fruits, seeds, birds, fishes, game, roots and other food stuffs. It is at least certain that all the world over men do now celebrate the solstices and the equinoxes as special feasts; and the close similarity in most such celebrations leads one to suspect that the custom has been handed down from the very remote time when the human family was still a single continuous body.

In the tropics, it is true, the days vary so little that this difference in itself is not likely to have struck primæval man. But there, another point would come in—the annual movement of the sun overhead from south to north and vice versa; and though this would be less directly important to human life than in temperate regions, it would still be indirectly important. It would bring the rain with it. In Europe, of course, and in temperate America, we can see at once that the return of the sun northward must always have meant spring, the increase of food stuffs, the promise of corn or maize, the suggestion of harvest; and we can therefore understand why the midwinter feast, when the sun after his long journey south begins to move visibly north again, should have been both in pagan and