Similarly with time.  Astronomical periodicity, and the periodicity of animal and vegetable life, are simultaneously used in the first stages of progress for estimating epochs.  The simplest unit of time, the day, nature supplies ready made.  The next simplest period, the mooneth or month, is also thrust upon men’s notice by the conspicuous changes constituting a lunation.  For larger divisions than these, the phenomena of the seasons, and the chief events from time to time occurring, have been used by early and uncivilised races.  Among the Egyptians the rising of the Nile served as a mark.  The New Zealanders were found to begin their year from the reappearance of the Pleiades above the sea.  One of the uses ascribed to birds, by the Greeks, was to indicate the seasons by their migrations.  Barrow describes the aboriginal Hottentot as denoting periods by the number of moons before or after the ripening of one of his chief articles of food.  He further states that the Kaffir chronology is kept by the moon, and is registered by notches on sticks—­the death of a favourite chief, or the gaining of a victory, serving for a new era.  By which last fact, we are at once reminded that in early history, events are commonly recorded as occurring in certain reigns, and in certain years of certain reigns:  a proceeding which practically made a king’s reign a measure of duration.

And, as further illustrating the tendency to divide time by natural phenomena and natural events, it may be noticed that even by our own peasantry the definite divisions of months and years are but little used; and that they habitually refer to occurrences as “before sheep-shearing,” or “after harvest,” or “about the time when the squire died.”  It is manifest, therefore, that the more or less equal periods perceived in Nature gave the first units of measure for time; as did Nature’s more or less equal lengths and weights give the first units of measure for space and force.

It remains only to observe, as further illustrating the evolution of quantitative ideas after this manner, that measures of value were similarly derived.  Barter, in one form or other, is found among all but the very lowest human races.  It is obviously based upon the notion of equality of worth.  And as it gradually merges into trade by the introduction of some kind of currency, we find that the measures of worth, constituting this currency, are organic bodies; in some cases cowries, in others cocoa-nuts, in others cattle, in others pigs; among the American Indians peltry or skins, and in Iceland dried fish.