One would suspect that this Melanesian science, like the knowledge of the stars, is borrowed from the Polynesians: for the latter understood the annual course of the sun. In Tahiti the place of the sunrise was called _tataheita_, that of the sunset _topa-t-era_. The annual movement of the sun from the south towards the north was recognised, and so was the fact that all these points of the daily approach to the zenith lay in a line. This meridian was called _t’era-hwattea_, the northern point of it _tu-errau_, and the opposite point above the horizon, or the south, _toa_[1051]. According to other sources the December solstice was called _rua-maoro_ or _rua-roa_, the June solstice _rua-poto_. The Hawaiians called the northern limit of the sun in the ecliptic ‘the black, shining road of Kane’, and the southern limit ‘the black, shining road of Kanaloa’. The equator was named ‘the bright road of the spider’ or ‘the road to the navel of Wakea’, equivalent to ‘the centre of the world’[1052]. How the Polynesians came to recognise the tropics and the equator is unfortunately unknown, but certainly they did it like other peoples by observing the solstices and equinoxes at certain landmarks. That the Greeks also recognised the solstices by means of the observation of certain landmarks may be gathered from a passage in Homer. In the Odyssey Eumaeus says of his native land: “A certain island Syrie ... above Ortygia, where the sun turns”[1053]. Wherever Syrie lay, even though in the realm of fable, the idea is that it lies in the direction of the spot at which the sun at its turning rises or sets. It therefore serves as a landmark, it is ‘the house of the sun’. Hesiod is so familiar with the winter and summer solstices that he reckons time from them in days[1054].