Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/252

238 Christian times the great festival of rejoicing for the men of the north temperate region. Day by day they saw the sun recede and the cold deepen; at last, one evening, he sets a little nearer, and they know that he has not deserted them forever. Similarly, the promise made at Yule begins to be realized at that other great feast of the spring equinox, which we still call in England by its ancient heathen title of Easter; the day by that time has got the better of the night, and "the sun dances on Easter Sunday" in commemoration of his completed victory over the combined powers of winter and darkness. In the tropics, on the other hand, the connection is less clear; but even here the shifting of the sun's apparent place is closely correlated with the shifting of the rain zone; and therefore it would not be long (after man was man) before tropical savages began to perceive a constant relation between the movements of the sun to north or south, and the occurrence of the fertilizing rainy season. We must remember that savages, with their improvident habits, are much more dependent upon rain than we are, and that magical ceremonies for breaking up a drought are among their commonest and most universally diffused superstitions.

On the whole, then, before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, we may be pretty sure that plants and animals on the one hand had learned organically and automatically to recognize the existence of the year and to adapt themselves to it; and that men or the progenitors of men on the other hand had also learned to correlate the recurrent seasons of food supply with the movements of the sun, though nothing equivalent to winter and summer as we know them to-day existed as yet on any part of our planet. I say advisedly "on any part of our planet," because even near the pole itself remains of a subtropical vegetation in Tertiary times have been amply indicated. Nevertheless, in all parts of the world then, as in the tropics now, we may gather that plants and animals ran through annual cycles—that the year, as I have put it, was organically recognized. Trees had their time to sprout, to bud, to flower, to fruit, to seed, to shed their leaves (in the evergreen way); birds had their time to nest and hatch out their young; insects had their fixed periods for laying, for larval life, for assuming the chrysalis form, for becoming winged beetles or bees or butterflies. In one word, the year is a terrestrial reality, not merely an astronomical fact, in the tropics now; it was a terrestrial reality over the whole planet in the Tertiary period. But it was hardly more marked, apparently, into distinct seasons than it is marked to-day in the equatorial region. Rainfall and drought must have had more to do in determining the annual cycles than winter and summer.

From all this it must result that the conception of the year as