Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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An obviously isolated method is the determination of the times of day from the daily twice-recurring ebb and flow of the tides; the method is also very unsuitable, since the period of a complete tide is 12 hours 25 minutes, so that the two periods together exceed the day by nearly an hour. In fact the Eskimos of Greenland are the only people who reckon by the tides. They divide up the day according to ebb and flow, although they must always reckon differently on account of the variations of the moon[156]. Dalsager[157] also points this out and remarks that their reckoning cannot last for two consecutive days, so that they have to make a fresh division every day. The rudiments of this method are however seen among some of the tribes of Polynesia. Immediately after the above-quoted divisions of the day among the Society Islanders are mentioned “the longer periods before noon and midnight during which the sea rises, and the others following these, in which it falls”[158], and “night or the light quite gone, when the sea begins to flow towards the land, about 11 at night”[159]. The Hawaiians called the rising of the tide by such names as the rising, big, full, and surrounding sea; when the water neither rose nor fell it was called the standing sea; the ebbing sea they spoke of as the parted, retiring, and defeated sea[160].