human activity. However this may be, the basic economic facts of life are seasonal. There is a time to sow and a time to reap, and it is of the utmost importance that man should know what is the best time for the execution of the various operations connected with hunting, fishing, horticulture, and the like, and, having by practical experience discovered the best time, then to know when it recurs. The solar clock records daily time at too frequent intervals to be of any practical value, and in the tropics at all events the variations in its apparent rising and setting at different times of the year are too slight to be of much practical importance unless a certain degree of culture has been attained. The Incas, for example, paid very little attention to the stars, but based their calendar on solar observations. They observed the seasonal risings and settings of the sun in relation to specially built small towers, regulated their season for sowing by the solar and not by the lunar year, and the equinoxes were also determined by means of the shadow of a pillar falling on a circle.[1] The phases of the moon provide a method of dividing time by lunar periods, but these have to be counted if annual occurrences are to be noted. The lunar clock has, so-to-speak, a more varied and mysterious mechanism than the solar, and it certainly has impressed itself to a great extent in folklore, a fact to which Dr. Rivers has drawn the attention of the Society.[2] Finally, the sidereal clock, by the rising and setting of stars and constellations with its annual periodicity, gives the precise information that is required, thus the agricultural and other operations are generally regulated by the very backward peoples by the movements of stars. Stars are grouped by most peoples into constellations representing human and animal forms, concerning which numerous tales have arisen, but always one finds that the basis of this interest in the heavenly
- ↑ Gaicilasso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries, i. pp. 177, 178, 180.
- ↑ “The Sociological Significance of Myth,” Folk-Lore, xxiii. 1912, p. 316.
