It is often stated that the assurance of the return of sunlight after the darkness of night enabled humanity with greater equanimity to acquiesce in the loss of light during one half of its existence and that worship was rendered to the Sun in gratitude therefor. “A new outlook upon life,” says Troels Lund, “awakens the moment the great discovery is made that the night of sleep and the night of fear are equally long and always followed by morning and subsequent day.” This discovery, however, our predecessors made long before they reached the human stage. Sun-worship by no means derived its origin therefrom. Rather it is traceable to evidence of the Sun’s connection with the changing seasons, although this change also is of domineering influence in the vegetable world inasmuch as the plants store reserve nourishment in the autumn, particularly, and on a large scale, during fructification. Also, lower and higher animals, for example, bees and squirrels, gather winter-stores. It is therefore small wonder if men on a comparatively low stage lay in provisions for the recurring periods of scant food supply. But a true chronometry beyond five days is foreign to the Australian negro as long as he can only count to four or five. He is aware that Moon-phases reappear and that summer and winter return, but he has no conception of the duration of the time passed between the recurrences of these phenomena. Further progress was made by the people who took the bold step to count the fingers, not on one hand alone, but on both hands, and thus reached the number ten. This was utilized in reckoning time so that the larger unit became a decade, _i. e._ ten days and nights. This unit was original with the Indo-Europeans, Semites, Hindus, Egyptians, and the islanders in the Pacific Ocean. Another advance yet was made in Mexico where the number twenty was introduced corresponding to the sum of all fingers and toes, and thus a unit of time was obtained comprising twenty days and nights. But to rise from these units to one of 365 days was a step exceedingly difficult for the primitive peoples to take.