THE SEASONS. The year is for us a numerical quantity of 365 or 366 days. But we speak of the year in two senses, first as the calendar year beginning on New Year’s Day, and secondly as the current year, a period of the same number of days beginning at one chosen day, as for instance in giving a person’s age. The word ‘year’ may however also represent the highest chronological unit even independently of the seasons, as in the case of the Egyptian shifting year of exactly 365 days, and the Islamite lunar year of 354. These however are exceptional cases. At the basis lies the natural year conditioned by the course of the sun and by the natural phases dependent thereon, which penetrate closely into the life of man. This connexion has necessitated the agreement of the numerical year with the sun, whence arises a situation very inconvenient for reckoning, namely that years of a varying number of days have to be accepted, since the natural year does not contain a whole number of days. The year as a numerical quantity is only the tardily attained summit of development, and the connexion with the natural year has always been so strongly felt that, except in certain cases such as the Egyptian and Islamite years, the chronological year has had to adjust itself accordingly. Here also we see the point of departure, the natural phenomena which are in the end dependent upon the course of the sun, such as the variation between heat and cold, verdure and snow, rainy season and drought, the blooming and withering of vegetation, between the different trade-winds or monsoons, between abundance and scarcity of food. With these and similar concrete phenomena the time-reckoning is from its origin bound up, and is at first discontinuous, i. e. it fixes the attention solely on the phenomena in question, and not on the year as a whole. The fusion of the various seasons into the circle of the year is arrived at only by degrees: the year is at first counted by the _pars pro toto_ method. The process is therefore similar to that already found in the discussion of the day. It must be granted as a premise to our investigation that when we speak of ‘seasons’ not only the larger divisions of the year are to be understood by the word--those which alone of all the natural epochs of the year are current among us to-day--but also smaller divisions which might perhaps be called seasonal points; for instance the times of cherry-blossoming and hop-picking are also seasons. Such short--often very short--seasons are not distinguished in any important feature from the longer: the difference only arises from the longer or shorter duration of the phenomena in question. The Hidatsa Indians describe any period thus marked by a natural occurrence, be it long or short, the hot season or the season of strawberries, by the same word, _kadu_, ‘season’, ‘time’ (of the occurrence), and the longer seasons include shorter[198].