In general, nations have marked this portion of time by some word which has a reference to the returning circle of seasons and employments. Thus the Latin annus signified a ring, as we see in the derivative annulus: the Greek term ἐνιαυτὸς implies something which returns into itself: and the word as it exists in Teutonic languages, of which our word year is an example, is said to have its origin in the word yra which means a ring in Swedish, and is perhaps connected with the Latin gyrus.
Sect. 2.—Fixation of the Civil Year.
The year, considered as a recurring cycle of seasons and of general appearances, must attract the notice of man as soon as his attention and memory suffice to bind together the parts of a succession of the length of several years. But to make the same term imply a certain fixed number of days, we must know how many days the cycle of the seasons occupies; a knowledge which requires faculties and artifices beyond what we have already mentioned. For instance, men cannot reckon as far as any number at all approaching the number of days in the year, without possessing a system of numeral terms, and methods [114] of practical numeration on which such a system of terms is always founded.[2] The South American Indians, the Koussa Caffres and Hottentots, and the natives of New Holland, all of whom are said to be unable to reckon further than the fingers of their hands and feet,[3] cannot, as we do, include in their notion of a year the fact of its consisting of 365 days. This fact is not likely to be known to any nation except those which have advanced far beyond that which may be considered as the earliest scientific process which we can trace in the history of the human race, the formation of a method of designating the successive numbers to an indefinite extent, by means of names, framed according to the decimal, quinary, or vigenary scale.
[2] Arithmetic in Encyc. Metrop. (by Dr. Peacock), Art. 8.
[3] Ibid. Art. 32.
But even if we suppose men to have the habit of recording the passage of each day, and of counting the score thus recorded, it would be by no means easy for them to determine the exact number of days in which the cycle of the seasons recurs; for the indefiniteness of the appearances which mark the same season of the year, and the changes to which they are subject as the seasons are early or late, would leave much uncertainty respecting the duration of the year. They would not obtain any accuracy on this head, till they had attended for a considerable time to the motions and places of the sun; circumstances which require more precision of notice than the general facts of the degrees of heat and light. The motions of the sun, the succession of the places of his rising and setting at different times of the year, the greatest heights which he reaches, the proportion of the length of day and night, would all exhibit several cycles. The turning back of the sun, when he had reached the greatest distance to the south or to the north, as shown either by his rising or by his height at noon, would perhaps be the most observable of such circumstances. Accordingly the τροπαὶ ἠελίοιο, the turnings of the sun, are used repeatedly by Hesiod as a mark from which he reckons the seasons of various employments. “Fifty days,” he says, “after the turning of the sun, is a seasonable time for beginning a voyage.”[4]
Ἤματα πεντήκοντα μετὰ τροπὰς ἠελίοιο
Ἐς τέλος ἐλθόντος θέρεος.—Op. et Dies, 661.
The phenomena would be different in different climates, but the recurrence would be common to all. Any one of these kinds of phenomena, noted with moderate care for a year, would show what was the number of days of which a year consisted; and if several years [115] were included in the interval through which the scrutiny extended, the knowledge of the length of the year so acquired would be proportionally more exact.
Besides those notices of the sun which offered exact indications of the seasons, other more indefinite natural occurrences were used; as the arrival of the swallow (χελιδών) and the kite (ἰκτίν), The birds, in Aristophanes’ play of that name, mention it as one of their offices to mark the seasons; Hesiod similarly notices the cry of the crane as an indication of the departure of winter.[5]