An exhaustive examination of all the material obtainable would doubtless lead to a more exact conception of the details of primitive time-reckoning. Above all, large districts with similar peculiarities in time-reckoning could be more accurately defined. The Arctic regions form a district of this nature. South America again differs characteristically from North America; Africa, the East Indian Archipelago, and the South Sea Islands all have their peculiarities. The borrowings which have undoubtedly taken place on a very large scale would be at least in part pointed out. This working up of the material is however the task of the ethnological specialist; my object is simply and solely to attain the above-mentioned goal of a general foundation. The observation of chronological matters varies greatly in the ethnographical literature; I have gone through many books without result, and in other cases my gains have often been small. It is only in quite recent times that attention has been paid with any great profit to this side of primitive life. Among the English authors Frazer has drawn up a list of ethnological questions (printed in the _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18_, 1889, pp. 431 ff., and also separately), paying due attention to time-reckoning, which has had a lasting and happy result, as can be seen especially in many papers in the _JRAI_ of succeeding years. Of the works of my predecessors only one has had any more elaborate aims--the ninth chapter of Ginzel’s handbook, which deals with the time-reckoning of the primitive peoples, divided up according to the different parts of the world. The significance of the time-reckoning of the primitive peoples for the history of chronology seems to have been only gradually grasped by the author in the course of his work, since it is not until after he has touched occasionally upon the question of primitive time-reckoning in the course of his account of the chronological systems of the Oriental peoples that he inserts the chapter in question between the latter and the chapters on the chronology of antiquity. Ginzel has in many respects a sound view of the nature of primitive time-reckoning, and makes many pertinent remarks, but on the whole his treatment, as is not seldom the case, is lacking in exactness and depth. I have gratefully made use of the material collected by him, going back, wherever possible, to the original sources. Of other previous works must be mentioned the essays of Andree and Frazer on the Pleiades,--the latter especially distinguished by its author’s usual extensive acquaintance with the sources and by its abundance of material--and the dissertation of Kötz upon the astronomical knowledge of the primitive peoples of Australia and the South Seas, an industrious work which however only touches superficially upon the problems here dealt with, and in regard to the lunisolar reckoning adopts the view