A study of ancient European calendars may, on the other hand, eke out our knowledge concerning the astronomic scheme in which Trita and his brothers played such important parts. We read that in the Attic year “each month was divided into three decades,” and the statement may confirm us in the opinion that, following an almost too mathematically imagined calendrical method, the ancestors of the Aryan race in remote ages counted their months, not as containing twenty-nine-and-a-half solar days, but as a portion of time containing three great equal divisions, the first, the second, and the third--Ekata, Dvita, Trita--each of these three parts being again subdivided into ten equal tithis. If this should have been the case, it would be interesting to note that the Greeks (and the Romans also, as shown by their cumbrous system of Kalends, Nones, and Ides) retained the plan of a threefold division of the months, but lost the originally concomitant arrangement of the ten equal divisions of each part into tithis, whence much difficulty ensued for Greeks and Romans alike in counting lunar months of alternately thirty and twenty-nine days. Indian astronomers, on the other hand, who retain the accurate and elaborate division of the month into equal tithis, must have long ago lost the thought of its originally threefold partition, for the Indians count each month as composed not of three periods of time, but of _a light and a dark half_.[93] [93] “The Luni-Solar year is used for the regulation of festivals and domestic arrangements; it commences at present at the instant of conjunction of the Sun and Moon in the Sidereal month Chaitra. The Hindu Lunar months invariably consist of thirty Tithis, or Lunar days; and the whole month is divided into two equal parts of fifteen Tithis each, the one called Shukla or Shuddh Paksha--the bright half or increase of the Moon; the other Krishna or Vadya Paksha--the dark half or decrease of the Moon.” (_The Indian Calendar_ for the year 1892.) To one more lunar Vedic personage let us direct our attention: namely, to Atri--Atri who, unlike the conquering and ever-victorious Trita, is chiefly celebrated for his misfortunes. Agni, Indra, and especially the Aswins, moved by his misfortunes, come to the help of Atri, and by means of a hundred acts, a hundred devices, they extricate him from captivity, whether from a dark cavern or from a burning chasm. They make the time of his captivity even pleasant to him, giving him refreshing drink. One of our own poets may help us to understand the Vedic metaphor of Atri’s darksome cave. In the _Samson Agonistes_ of Milton, the hero, describing his blindness, says-- “The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon When she deserts the night, Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.”