The Hottentots seem to keep in view the vegetation rather than the climate. Their seasons are four in number. First, early spring. When with increasing warmth, independently of the rain-fall, trees and bushes break into leaf, and in good years winter or early spring rains have revived the grass, spring or blossoming-time has come; it begins in August and ends in October. The following season, which in the upland Damara dialect is called ‘the sun-time’, embraces the first half of the hot period in which, when the year is good, the so-called lesser rains fall. If these are wanting, or, as is usually the case, are scanty, the land is for the most part desolate, without grass or herbage. This time of drought is described by the same word as the drought itself: it prevails from October to December inclusive. The season upon the productiveness of which the welfare of the Hottentots in the main depends may be called the pasture-season: it includes the period of the greater rains and the time immediately after this, when the fodder has not yet lost its freshness. It fills, loosely speaking, the period January-April, and constitutes summer and early autumn. Winter, or the cold season, May to August, embraces two-thirds of autumn and the first half of winter[300]. The Herero also have four seasons:--spring (from September onwards), summer, autumn or the rainy season, and winter[301]. In Burmah there are three seasons, though certainly they are regulated by the months: the cold season, the hot season, and the rainy season[302]. The Polynesians usually have two long seasons, but three are not unheard of. A native of the island of Molokai, in the Sandwich group, states that there the year was divided into three seasons:--_maka-lii_, _kau_, and _hoo-ilo_. _Maka-lii_ was so called because the sun was then less visible, being obscured by clouds, and the days were shortened. _Kau_ was so termed because tapa could then safely be spread out to dry. _Hoo-ilo_ meant ‘changeable’[303]. The two main seasons are called _kau_ and _hoo-ilo_. It is to be observed however that in a notice from Hawaii they are called _hoo-ilo_ and _maka-lii_[304]. This shews that the number is not fixed. On the Society Islands besides the two seasons regulated by the Pleiades there were also three seasons: (1) _tetau_, autumn or season of plenty, the harvest of bread-fruit, commencing with December and continuing until _faahu_, which corresponded to January and a part of February, the time of the most frequent rains, comprising three months; (2) _te tau miti rahi_, the season of high sea, November to January; (3) _te tau poai_, the longest season, winter, the season of drought and scarcity of food, which usually extended from July to October[305]. It will however be seen that these seasons do not fill up the year, and that the second partly covers the first. Their names are taken from different phenomena of Nature. The New Zealanders