This method has become popular, and its popularity has been assisted by the fact that the people, through the use of the rune-staves recording the golden numbers, were accustomed to the calculation of the new moon. Above all the first moon of the year (_nykung_ = ‘new king’) played a very important part. The men took off their hats and the women curtseyed when they saw it; from it were taken oracles for the new year. The question is whether a popular name was also given to the new moons. Apart from the almanacs, which use the names of months introduced into them, I find in Swedish only one example: _Torretungel_ (_tungel_, dialect for ‘new moon’)[1031]. The Danish chronologist Worm gives both a lunar and a solar series of names of months[1032]. The names are for the most part equivalent or similar to those of the solar series, but in the first half of the year they occupy an earlier position, which fact certainly has something to do with the naming of the new moons according to the usual computation. Worm expressly states that these lunar months were still in use and began with the first new moon of the new year. An account of connected lunar months among the East Finns has been translated and communicated to me by Professor Wiklund. The authority makes a man of the people speak as follows[1033]:--“The moon which is born while the winter day is still in his house (December 18-22), or after that, is the first heart- (middle-)moon. In this way the Christmas festival sometimes falls in the first heart-moon, and then we hope for a good harvest. But when the first heart-moon is born late, e. g. after Twelfth Day, there is no second heart-moon in this year, but there follow the foam-moon (so called because the snow looks like foam), the snow-crust moon, the melting moon, the sprouting moon, etc.... When we reckon the moons of the year, beginning with the first heart-moon, we sometimes get thirteen months in the year, although there are only twelve book-months.” At first sight it is very tempting to see in this account old Finnish moon-months regulated by the winter solstice, as e. g. among the Siberian peoples, which would be quite conceivable so far north. However this is not so. The heart-moon is in the given instance doubled, i. e. it is an intercalary moon. Now it is a familiar fact that the intercalary month, i. e. the first of the two months with the same name, gets in front of the regulating-point; it is therefore ‘forgotten’, and a second moon with the same name is inserted after it. We must therefore ask:--Within what limits, under the given conditions, will the moon fall which in ordinary years is the heart-moon, in leap-year the second heart-moon? The following tables give the answer: the limits begin at the two extremes of new moon on the first and on the twenty-ninth of January; we must of course reckon one day for the solstice, December 21, and not the whole ‘house’.