Ever since the principal food of man has been the produce of fruit-trees or the corn, the fruit- and corn-harvests and the whole period of vegetation in general have been of decisive importance for his well-being. We have already seen how this circumstance has left its mark upon the indications of the seasons, and in the same way the second most important method of counting years is to reckon by harvests or vegetation-periods. The fellahs of Palestine still do this. Their usual method is to reckon from one harvest to another, or, as they put it, ‘from threshing-floor to threshing-floor’[407]. In modern Arabia rents are hardly ever reckoned for a whole year, but only until the next spring, _rabi_, when the young animals are sold, or, as by the fellahs, until the next threshing-time, _bedar_, when the farmer can realise upon his corn[408]. The Negrito of Zambales determine the year by the planting or harvesting season, but their minds rarely go back farther than the last season[409]. In Bavaria in the Middle Ages the years used to be reckoned in autumns. The ceremonial reckoning in the Sanskrit ritual texts is in autumns, Sanskrit _çarad_, ‘autumn’[410]. The subjects of the Incas had a word _huata_, ‘year’, which as a verb meant ‘_attacher_’: but the lower classes reckoned in harvests[411]. This is also done in the district around Mombasa[412]. The Arabs sometimes reckon the years as e. g. 40 _charif_, _charif_ being the time of the date-harvest[413]. We have already spoken of the rice-year in the East Indian Archipelago as a combination of the agricultural seasons; the period of vegetation of the rice also serves, although seldom, for the counting of the year. Among the Toradja the time needed for a plant to come to its full development up to maturity is called _ta’oe_, and _santa’oe_ accordingly means ‘a year ago’. _Sampae_ is the rice-year of six months, but _santa’oe_ has practically the same meaning, since the rice is the most important cultivated plant. In general, however, the word is seldom used as a time-indication, but the years are reckoned by well-known events (on this see below, pp. 99 ff.); nevertheless expressions like the following are heard:--_santa’oe owi_, ‘when last year’s rice-crops still stood on the field’, _roeanta’oe owe_, ‘two harvests ago’[414]. In the South Sea Islands the bread-fruit is the most important article of food: the people, as we have seen, know a time of abundance of food and a time of scarcity. We are told:--The Malay word for ‘year’ is _taun_ or _tahun_. In all Polynesian dialects the primary sense of _tau_ is ‘a season’, ‘a period of time’. In the Samoan group _tau_ or _tausanga_, besides the primary sense of season, has the definite meaning of ‘a period of six months’, and conventionally that of ‘a year’, as on the island of Tonga. Here the word has the further sense of ‘the produce of a year’, and derivatively ‘a year’. In the Society group it simply means ‘season’.