Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/377

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IV. THE CULTURE HERO.

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night,' where an Englishman might use 'sennight;' similarly, a fortnight is in Welsh pythewnos, 'a fifteen-night,' and the Irish cóicthiges (genitive cóicthigisi of the same meaning, is also derived from the name of the fifteenth numeral in its Irish form: compare the French huitaine and quinzaine respectively.^[1] This way of counting, then, was the same as that usual in music, where a third is said to consist of two tones, or whatever the description of the intervals in any given case may happen to be; so a nine-night week would contain only eight days or eight portions of daylight, and that was, I believe, the ancient week of the Aryans, at least of the Aryans of Western Europe. In Italy we have traces of it in the Roman nundinæ or markets held every ninth day: the word is supposed to represent an older and longer form, novendinæ, from the ninth numeral; and it happens that nundinæ, in a manuscript of the eighth or ninth century,

↑ A curious instance of this way of reckoning occurs in the Isle of Man, where the oath administered to the deemster since the revestment in 1765, makes the six days of creation in the book of Genesis into six days and seven nights. It runs thus: 'By this book, and by the holy contents thereof, and by the wonderful works that God hath miraculously wrought in heaven above and in the earth beneath in six days and seven nights, I, A B, do swear that I will, without respect of favour or friendship, love or gain, consanguinity or affinity, envy or malice, execute the laws of this isle justly, betwixt our sovereign lady the Queen and her subjects within this isle, and betwixt party and party, as indifferently as the herring backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish.' So stands the oath in Harrison's Records of the Tynwald, &c. (Douglas, 1871), p. 37; but it has been the practice of late years to make 'the six days and seven nights' into 'six days and nights;' and I have heard it characterized as an unwarranted innovation. This curious oath otherwise reminds one of old Irish oaths, with their invocation of the sun, the moon, the earth and the elements.

[1] A curious instance of this way of reckoning occurs in the Isle of Man, where the oath administered to the deemster since the revestment in 1765, makes the six days of creation in the book of Genesis into six days and seven nights. It runs thus: 'By this book, and by the holy contents thereof, and by the wonderful works that God hath miraculously wrought in heaven above and in the earth beneath in six days and seven nights, I, A B, do swear that I will, without respect of favour or friendship, love or gain, consanguinity or affinity, envy or malice, execute the laws of this isle justly, betwixt our sovereign lady the Queen and her subjects within this isle, and betwixt party and party, as indifferently as the herring backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish.' So stands the oath in Harrison's Records of the Tynwald, &c. (Douglas, 1871), p. 37; but it has been the practice of late years to make 'the six days and seven nights' into 'six days and nights;' and I have heard it characterized as an unwarranted innovation. This curious oath otherwise reminds one of old Irish oaths, with their invocation of the sun, the moon, the earth and the elements.

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