birds are tender and the time of the corn-harvest has not yet come, so that it seems right to me and my brothers to add to this year thirty days.” The intercalary month was the last month of the year, _Adar_. On rare occasions _Nisan_, when it had begun, was altered into _Adar II_. Here the intercalation took place in the interests of the religious cult, but the cult on its side was dependent on the natural phenomena. The intercalation is of the same empirical order as that which we have met among the primitive peoples. It is only that the development of the ecclesiastical laws has led to a judicial procedure, and the task of determining the intercalation has been handed over to a committee of the Sanhedrin. There exists a possibility of a somewhat different development among peoples who originally had less than twelve months and also counted a vacant interval: it is conceivable that the unnamed months may be named, until at last twelve months have names and the vacant interval remains only as an intercalary month. This seems to be the case among the Central Eskimos; they have a ‘sunless’ month, which covers the time when the sun does not appear and when there is also hardly any twilight: it is said to be of indeterminate length. After an interval of a few years this month is left out, if new moon and winter solstice coincide[884]. When the intercalary month has thus arisen, its position in the year is fixed. One other example of this method may exist. The author who gives the list of the months of the Kwakiutl of the Island of Vancouver, beginning with March, inserts between the tenth and eleventh months the winter solstice, and says that the solstice moons are called by a name which probably means ‘split both ways’, and adds that the readjustment is made in midwinter[885]. Unfortunately the author does not tell us how the readjustment is made, whether the winter solstice moon or some other moon is the intercalary month. If the former be the case, the explanation is given by the above. There is rarely any rule for the position of the intercalary month. Where the sources simply enumerate a thirteen-month series, it is to be presumed that no fixed position for the intercalary month exists. But such a month can be found, since naturally a month named from a natural phase of less importance will be omitted, or an additional month inserted, at a time when there is little work going on, and when consequently little attention is paid to the time-reckoning. So it is said of the Pawnee that the intercalary month was usually put in after the summer months[886]. On the Society Islands the month corresponding to our March or our July was commonly omitted[887].