And here a very important point comes in; which time of the year and day of the year are most easy to fix by astronomical observation? As a matter of fact the summer solstice, the position of the sun on the longest day, is a point easily fixed. All we have to do is to observe the sun rising more and more to the north as the summer approaches, until at the very height of the summer we have the extreme north-easterly point of the horizon reached, and the sun stands still. We have the solstice. We can then put a row of stakes up, and so fix the solstitial line. Of course we find, as mankind has found generally, that the sun comes back next year to that same solstitial place of rising or setting. So that when we have once got such an alignment for the rising of the sun at midsummer, we can determine the length of the year in days, and therefore the beginning of each year as it comes round. So much, then, for the chief points in what we may term the astronomical year, those at which the sun’s declination is greatest and least. We see that they are approximately ninety-one days apart--say three months. CHAPTER III THE AGRICULTURAL DIVISIONS OF THE YEAR The early peoples have been very much misrepresented, and held to have been uninstructed, by several writers who have not considered what they were really driving at. It was absolutely essential for early man, including the inhabitants of Britain as it was then--townless, uncivilised--that the people should know something about the proper time for performing their agricultural operations. We now go into a shop and for a penny buy an almanack which gives us everything we want to know about the year, the month and the day, and that is the reason why so few of us care about astronomy: we can get all we want from astronomy for a penny or twopence. But these poor people, unless they found out the time of the year and the month and the day for themselves, or got some one to tell them--and their priests were the men who knew, and they were priests because they knew--had absolutely no means of determining when their various agricultural operations should take place. So that we find all over the world temples erected in the very first flush of civilisation.