The custom of reckoning on the fingers or on a notched stick has doubtless lent assistance to the counting of the days of the month. The Wa-Sania make a notch in a stick for every day, and when the month is ended they put this stick aside and begin a new one[713]. At the southern corner of Lake Nyassa the days are counted by means of pieces of wood threaded on a string[714]. A complete enumeration of the days however only exists among highly developed peoples who have discarded a more concrete time-reckoning in favour of an abstract system, just as the civilised peoples of modern Europe abandoned the Roman system of time-reckoning, which was still often used in the Middle Ages (though indeed it had long since departed from its concrete basis), in favour of a simple enumeration of the days of the month. Finally a couple of curious East African reckonings of the days of the month are to be mentioned, although they are not primitive but have a lengthy development behind them. A common feature of both is that the day of the new moon is already the fourth day, so that the counting of the days begins with the moon’s invisibility, which can hardly have been the original practice. The Wadschagga divide the month into four parts the days of which are numbered, the first and third parts consisting of ten days each, and the second and fourth of five days each. Accordingly they begin to count the new moon at ‘the fourth day, which brings the moon’, the day on which the slender delicate crescent of the moon first reappears after sunset: for the rites of this day see above, p. 153. On the fourth day of the second division (the eleventh after new moon) they say that ‘the moon turns to the back of the house’: when twilight falls it is already seen beyond the culmination-point. The fourth day of the third division (the 16th after new moon) is called ‘the day that brings the moon up from below’ (i. e. from the eastern horizon), where ‘it appears like a pot’; the fourth day of the last division is called ‘the four, which dismisses the moon’, and the first of the first division, when the moon vanishes, ‘the one, which floats away the moon so that it is no longer visible’: it ‘tramples into pieces the days of the God’[715]. The natural phases of the moon therefore make themselves felt in spite of the counting. With this, as is so often the case, is connected a fully developed superstition concerning the days of the month. The Masai in ordinary life reckon their moon-months as consisting of 30 days, and number the days from 1 to 30 or 29. Besides this there is a second way of counting which begins at the 16th and reckons the days of darkness (_en aimen_). Further, special prominence is given to certain days and groups of days, e. g. to the 4th, the new-moon day, hence called also _ertaduage duo olaba_, ‘the moon is to be seen’, to the 15th, _ol gadet_, i. e. the rising moon ‘looks over’ to the sun which has not yet set,