adopt the lunar year appear to employ an extra month. The Hawaiians, for example, had their system of twelve lunar months of thirty days each, to which were added five extra days, as already explained. This would leave very little leeway to make up, and that could be managed by manipulation of the nights of the moon, a practice that was certainly followed by our Maori folk.
The weak point of the thirty-day month appears to lie in the fact that it exceeds the period of lunar revolution, and this would soon make itself apparent, and call for remedy. The Maori gives the names of thirty nights of the moon in the great majority of cases, as also do natives of the various isles of Polynesia. It is quite possible that two systems were practised, one marked by a thirteen-month year, and the other by one of twelve months accompanied by some method of regulating that has not been explained.
It has been stated that the Maori year was one of ten months. This was apparently an error. Our best authorities, including the high-class teachings of the Takitumu tribes, give specific names for twelve months, and frequently allude to the divisions of the year as being ngahuru ma rua (ten and two) in number. In some districts, however, loosely applied terms seem to have been used to denote the eleventh and twelfth months, these two being deemed of little importance; the important tasks of the year concluded with the gathering of the harvest in the tenth month. In his Account of New Zealand, published in 1835, the Rev. Mr. Yate, who resided in the far North, wrote: "They compute time by moons, of which they count ten in the course of the year, reckoning three moons for one at the latter end of the season. The reason they give for this is that during two months between autumn and winter they have nothing to do in the way of cultivation; their time, consequently, is then occupied in comparative idleness. They are generally very correct in their time, and take their season for planting by the blossoms which appear upon some of the early shrubs." This writer adds concerning the two unnamed months: "These two months are not in their calendar; they do not reckon them, nor are they in any way accounted for."
Now, the above remarks do not describe a genuine ten-months year; they imply that twelve months were recognized, but that the last two had no specific or generally used terms applied to them. At the same time the present writer maintains that those natives had some form of name by which the two months were designated. Even in districts where each of the twelve months had a distinctive and well-known name, certain expressions, such as ngahuru tuhoehoe, were sometimes employed to denote the last two months of the year.
We know that in far lands the ten-months year has been known in the past, but in such cases the year was divided into ten equal, or, nearly equal, parts. It was not a case of including a period of three months in the name of the tenth month, as explained by Mr. Yate. In the very early times of the City of Rome the community had a ten-months year covering 304 days, and so had much leeway to make up. In later times two more months were added.
