Exactly the same process recurs in the Indian seasons. The natural division of the North Indian year is into three periods--a warm, a rainy, and a cold season. Three corresponding seasons are the most usual in the Vedic period, and these are still the popular divisions in the Punjab. Later two transitional periods are interpolated, one of an autumnal character between the rainy season and the cold season, and a warm period between the cold season and the hot. These five seasons often occur in the Brahmanas. The well-known six seasons--_vasanta_, spring; _grishma_, hot season; _varsha_, rainy season; _śarad_, autumn; _hemanta_, winter; _śiśira_, cool season: the cold season is divided into two periods--are the result of a systematic comparison with the months, the latter being distributed in pairs among the seasons. By this arrangement the rainy season is the loser, since it embraces at least three months. There is also a second sexpartite division of the year, not indeed mentioned in the Vedic literature but better corresponding to the course of the seasons, in which the rainy season is divided into two periods[324]. The splitting up of the seasons persists to this day among the Germanic peoples; but a systematising of these small seasons is only found when they are referred to the Julian months. This point will be dealt with below, in chapter XI. The phenomenon is known to me from my own native district. The word _höst_, ‘autumn’, still persists there in the old literal sense of harvest, mowing, and indeed _höhösten_ is particularly the hay-harvest. Hence the designation of the autumn season as _höst_ is felt to be insufficiently accurate and the term is replaced by _efterhöst_, literally ‘after-harvest’, late autumn. Between summer and _efterhöst_ appears the _skyr_ (dialect for _skörd_), the harvest, as a fifth season; sometimes there is added a sixth season, _sivinter_, late winter. Little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, though it is common enough. The periods of the rural occupations in particular give rise to such terms. Any period of this nature is described by the old Swedish word _and_ (_ann_), now obsolete except in dialects. For the other districts I add from the Dialect Dictionary of Rietz:--_hobal_, the period on the one hand between the tillage in spring and the hay-harvest, and on the other between the hay- and the corn-harvest, the former period being the greater, the latter the small _hobal_. Elsewhere the word has the form _hovel_, summer being divided into _hoveln_, _mellan-anna_ and _ann_ (which is here used pregnantly to mean harvest). Compounds with _and_ are _vår-_, _säs-_, _gödsel-_, _hö-_, _slått-_, _skår-_, _skyr-_ and _sädes-and_ (periods of spring, sowing, manuring, hay, hay-harvest, harvest, corn). The North Frisians of Amrum and Föhr for instance mark events by the periods _um julham_ (‘at Christmas’), _um wosham_ (‘in early spring’), _pluchleth_ (ploughing-time), _meedarleth_ (hay-harvest),