But civil time and the global business reckonings that have come to depend on it require new beginnings on January 1. So thanks to some complex decisions made by Julius Caesar back in 46 B.C., we’re stuck with this date. What are our choices if we’d like to break with tradition?

We could return to the earliest New Years in recorded history and celebrate with the ancient Mesopotamians, some of whom started their year with the new moon nearest the spring equinox, others of whom started theirs with the new moon nearest the fall equinox.

Other spring possibilities are March 1, which was favored by the early Romans, or March 25, which was favored by early European Christians. Other fall possibilities include the Jewish New Year, which happens in either September or October because it depends on the moon, and the Celtic New Year, which always happens on November 1 because it depends on the sun.

A more dramatic break with traditon would be to abandon all Middle Eastern, Jewish, Christian, Roman, Celtic, and English roots and celebrate with the Chinese. They count the new moons after the winter solstice and start their lunar New Year with the second one — which occurs sometime between January 20-21 and February 20-21. Historically, they also used to celebrate a solar New Year that began around February 4 — the time of year they called the Beginning of Spring.

Yet another option, which has definite appeal, would be to forget about New Years altogether. In the cycle of the seasons there is no real beginning or ending, so why bother to stop or start again what’s essentially continuous?

Was Julius Caesar a joker who saddled us with an arbitrary New Year? Or was he perhaps a bit like Janus, the Roman god of gateways and beginnings, who was capable of looking both backward and forward at the same time?

Looking backward, Caesar saw the need for an agreed upon New Year. Looking forward, maybe he saw that future civilizations would need a fixed and mathematically calculable New Year that could be accepted across boundaries and cultures without respect to past traditions. As of 2000-plus years later, his choice of January 1 seems to be serving the purpose.

MORE INFORMATION

New Year – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year

This Wikipedia entry for the New Year has lots of information and lots of links.

New Year Traditions Around the World at FatherTime’s Net

http://www.fathertimes.net/traditions.htm

This is an Australian Web site and it has ads, but it offers a bit of information on just about every New Year that is celebrated around the world.

He spent three winters trying to draw snowflakes, but they melted before he could capture all the details. So he talked his parents into buying him a special camera-microscope combination that he theorized could take photographs of snowflakes. It took him two more winters, but he finally got that first photograph.

Forty-six years and more than 5,000 photographs later, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, who died at age 66, had established himself as a world authority on snowflakes. One way to appreciate his accomplishment is to go outdoors during a snowstorm and try to catch, magnify, and examine some snowflakes yourself.

You’ll find that it’s challenging. But I’ve discovered a quick and easy way to get a look at some occasional snowflakes. I just turn my binoculars upside down, which changes them from long-distance magnifiers to close-up magnifiers, and look at the snowflakes that fall on the dark sleeve of my winter jacket.

One of the first things I learned from my own observations is that Snowflake Bentley wasn’t photographing whole snowflakes. He was photographing individual snow crystals from the groups of crystals that we call snowflakes. A snowflake is an amorphous clump, while a snow crystal is an exquisite six-sided structure.

According to the experts who followed Bentley, snow crystals come in seven different shapes, but the shape I notice most often is the one Bentley himself saw most often. It’s a stellar crystal — as opposed to a plate, column, needle, spatial dendrite, capped column, or irregular crystal. A stellar crystal looks like a child’s paper cut-out — a lacy, six-pointed star.

For me it’s enough to see a few transient snow crystals through reversed binoculars, but Bentley wanted to study as many as he could, compare them, and learn from them. In the process, he created permanent images that all of us can share.

If you’d like to see some of these images, look for a copy of Snow Crystals, a collection of over 2,000 of Bentley’s photographs that was published shortly before he died. They represent Bentley’s work at its best — science so good it’s art.

MORE INFORMATION

Snowflake Bentley

http://snowflakebentley.com

This is the Jericho (Vermont) Historical Society’s Web site. Snowflake Bentley lived in Jericho, and the Historical Society has quite a bit of archival material by or about him. Their attractive Web site includes excellent photos of Bentley and some of his snowflakes. Under Resources you will find the text of articles written by Bentley himself 1910-1925, a list of books about him, numerous links to other Web sites, and answers to Frequently Asked Questions. They offer online shopping for many–some of them unique–snowflake-related items from their gift shop, plus a virtual tour of their museum, plus an online newsletter, plus a lively and interesting message board.

Bentley Snow Crystal Collection

http://bentley.sciencebuff.org/index.htm

This Buffalo Museum of Science site offers a digital library of Snowflake Bentley’s original images just as they were taken. It also includes a biography, an explanation of his photographic process, and other resource material. I found the background on how this digital library was produced quite interesting.

Wilson Bentley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Bentley

The Wikipedia article on Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley includes a brief biography with several links to related Wikipedia articles. The ones I found most interesting were MICROSCOPES (especially HISTORY OF), the year 1885, and WILLIAM D. HUMPHREYS, a physicist who helped Bentley get his photographs published. It also offers several snowflake photos, plus a bibliography, plus a link back to the Jericho Historical Society’s Web site. At the very bottom of the page are links to the categories Bentley is included in, the most fascinating of which is AUTODIDACTS….

Imbolc meant the beginning of spring for the Celtic peoples of northern Europe and the British Isles. Lambs were born and with them came the promise of new life and the beginning of a new agricultural year that would proceed through Beltane (May 1), Lughnasa (August 1), and Samhain (November 1).

Our American Groundhog Day doesn’t derive directly from the Celtic Imbolc but rather from a Christian celebration that chanced to coincide with Imbolc. Early Christians evolved a church ritual to be celebrated forty days after Christmas — February 2 on their calendar. It was called Candlemas because it involved blessing candles to be used in the new year.

As the Christian church moved into northern Europe and the British Isles, it encountered the Celts who were already celebrating Imbolc in early February. As these Celts were converted, they associated the new Christian Candlemas with their old Imbolc — and therefore with the beginning of spring. Because to them spring meant planting, Candlemas became the day they looked for a sign of how soon they would be able to plant. They came to believe that if it was sunny enough on Candlemas for an animal to cast a shadow, there would be six more weeks of winter. Stormy or overcast weather on Candlemas meant an early spring.

This Celtic/Christian weather belief got superimposed on North American groundhogs by European farmers who came to this country. So we now have Groundhog Day every February 2 to remind us — like the ancient Celts — to think about spring. If you’d like to combine several of these historic beliefs and rituals into a modern Imbolc/Candlemas celebration, you can start by paying attention to the sunrise and sunset on February 1 and enjoying every minute of daylight.

After sunrise on February 2, you can go outdoors and look for your own shadow to see how much longer we’re going to have to wait for spring. And maybe after sunset you can light a candle and think about spring. Then you can spend the next six weeks much as the ancient Celts did, observing subtle changes in the natural world as the days lengthen and the weather warms. When your local soil is finally workable enough to plant a seed, you’ll know it’s really spring.

MORE INFORMATION

Cross Quarter Days

http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/crossquartergrd.html

Not many scientists write about the Celtic cross-quarter days, but this one does. As the former director of the Hansen Planetarium in Utah, he knows his astronomy — and also his weather, his natural history, and other cultures’ practices with respect to the solar year. He writes a newspaper column called “Looking Around” from which this very readable essay is adapted.

Imbolc – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc

Th Wikipedia article covers the Celtic origins of Imbolc and modern practices related to February 1. It offers internal links to Wikipedia articles on other Celtic celebrations and external links to several Web sites.

These mini-seasons, each of which lasts for 15 or 16 days, are called solar terms, or more poetically, “joints and breaths.” The year begins with the solar term called “Spring Begins,” which occurs halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox — on February 4 in the year 2000.

Using dates based on Universal Time — the time at the Greenwich Meridian — to avoid the confusion that can be caused by different time zones and the international date line, the solar terms for 2000 are:

Spring Begins (Feb 4-Feb 18)
Rain Water (Feb 19-Mar 4)
Excited Insects (Mar 5-Mar 19)
Vernal Equinox (Mar 20-Apr 3)
Clear and Bright (Apr 4-Apr 18)
Grain Rains (Apr 19-May 4)
Summer Begins (May 5-May 19)
Grain Fills (May 20-Jun 4)
Grain in Ear (Jun 5-Jun 20)
Summer Solstice (Jun 21-Jul 5)
Slight Heat (Jul 6-Jul 21)
Great Heat (Jul 22-Aug 6)
Autumn Begins (Aug 7-Aug 21)
Limit of Heat (Aug 22-Sep 6)
White Dew (Sep 7-Sep 21)
Autumn Equinox (Sep 22-Oct 6)
Cold Dew (Oct 7-Oct 22)
Hoar Frost (Oct 23-Nov 6)
Winter Begins (Nov 7-Nov 21)
Little Snow (Nov 22-Dec 5)
Great Snow (Dec 6-Dec 20)
Winter Solstice (Dec 21-Jan 5)
Little Cold (Jan 6-Jan 19)
Great Cold(Jan 20-Feb 3)

These 24 solar terms helped ancient Chinese farmers remember their way through the agricultural year, and they could easily be adapted to help modern naturalists remember their way through the natural year.

Because the solar terms are based on the sun rather than complicated, sometimes compromised solar-lunar systems that underlie most civil and religious calendars, they offer the purest, most natural calendar I’ve found.

MORE INFORMATION

The Friesian School

http://www.friesian.com/chinacal.htm

This Web site offers detailed information on the Chinese calendar with a clear explanation of the solar terms. There are also a number of links that lead to additional information. For consistency, I use this Web site’s translations for the names of each solar term and its dates for the year 2000.

Chinese Fortune Calendar

http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/FAQ.htm

This is a Chinese astrology Web site, but it’s written by a mathematician/computer scientist who has spent over a decade researching solar and lunar dates. His explanation of the Chinese solar terms is clear and simple, and the rest of his Web site is full of fascinating information.

Lichun – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichun

This Wikipedia article is written partially in Chinese, but it also includes some good information in English. A solar terms graphic and a chart of dates offer useful references.

Scholars aren’t sure exactly who the historic Valentine was, but he’s remembered as a martyr, not a lover. His feast day has since been dropped from the church calendar, so his only lasting contribution to today’s Valentine’s Day is his name.

As for the birds, medieval Christians observed that some of them were mating at the time of Saint Valentine’s feast. They therefore decided to believe that all birds chose their mates on February 14. In the early 1380s Chaucer offered a written record of this belief in his long love poem, The Parliament of Fowls: “For this was on St. Valentine’s Day/When every fowl cometh there to choose his mate.”

From the medieval folk belief about birds, it wasn’t much of a leap to decide that human beings should choose their mates on Saint Valentine’s Day too — or at least engage in games and rituals associated with mating. Actually, this birds/Valentine’s Day connection is not too far-fetched. Even in snowy Vermont, several species of birds have begun to mate by February.

If you go outdoors on Valentine’s eve, for instance, you might hear owls hooting. The owls I hear most often, the eight-hooters known as barred owls, can be courting loudly by mid-February. Eastern screech-owls can be courting too. The largest of our common owls, the great horneds, might already be sitting on their eggs.

After sunrise on Valentine’s Day itself you might hear black-capped chickadees practicing their territorial fee-bee songs and hairy woodpeckers drumming on hollow trees to re-establish their pair-bonds. But perhaps the most observable of these early birds is the plain old pigeon. Vermont’s pigeons are often in the advanced stages of courting by Valentine’s Day and have been known to have young in their nests by early March.

So as you’re thinking about Valentine’s Day, alert yourself to subtle shifts in bird behavior. For birds, this time of year has nothing to do romantic love. Their behavior is a very real biological response to the changing seasons, with some species already bonded or forming the bonds that will produce, protect, and launch their young.

And isn’t that probably what our human Valentine’s Day — whatever its various roots — was originally all about?

MORE INFORMATION

History Channel

http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/valentine/

The History Channel offers interesting background information, attractive graphics, and some nice love stories about couples like the Trumans, the Brownings, and the Jackie Robinsons.

Catholic Encyclopedia

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15254a.htm

New Advent offers the Catholic Encyclopedia online. Their entry on St. Valentine tells what is known about who he might have been with links to additional historical information. They mention Chaucer and the connection between St. Valentine’s Day and birds.

Valentine’s Day – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine’s_Day

The Wikipedia entry on Valentine’s Day will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Valentine’s Day.

The Ides divided Roman months approximately in half. In Julius Caesar’s time they occurred on the 15th day of 31-day months and the 13th day of the others. So Caesar’s Ides of March was March 15, the day on which he was assassinated in 44 B.C. If Caesar had been warned to beware of March 15, however, or even the 15th day of March, he would not have known what day to prepare for.

In 44 B.C., the Romans numbered their days according to an ancient system that derived from a primitive lunar calendar. They called the first day of each month the Kalends, which means “to proclaim.” It refers back to a time when priests proclaimed the beginning of a new month at the first visible crescent of the new moon.

In Caesar’s time, priests still proclaimed a new month on the Kalends, but months were no longer based on the moon. The priests merely announced how many days it would be until the next important day of the new month. This next important day was the Nones, which may once have been the day of the moon’s first quarter but by Caesar’s time was always scheduled for the ninth day before the Ides.

In the old lunar calendar, the Ides had been the day of the full moon, but by Caesar’s time it was simply the midpoint of the month. Because the lunar calendar was always looking forward to the next phase of the moon, its days counted downward to the anticipated day. Caesar’s days still counted downward too.

Therefore, the last few days before his assassination would have been numbered V Ides, IV Ides, III Ides, Day Before Ides, and Ides — not March 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. When you think about it, this way of counting time has its merits.

We still count down to days that excite us — our birthdays, holidays, the last day of school. Maybe when we started counting upward, we lost a significant vestige of lunar influence that the Roman calendar still clung to — days that looked forward to the future rather than days that merely added up the past.

MORE INFORMATION

Bill Hollon on Calendars

http://www.12×30.net/calends.html

Bill Hollon’s Web site on calendars includes a substantial discussion of the Calends, Nones, and Ides, with graphics and footnotes.

Web Exhibits

http://webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-roman.html

Web Exhibits answers nine questions about the Roman calendar, two of which have to do with the Ides: What were the Roman weekdays? and Beware the Ides of March! If you recognize some of Bill Hollon’s material, it’s because he’s given Web Exhibits permission to use his text, but the format and graphics are different.

Claus Tondering on the Roman Calendar

http://www.tondering.dk/claus/cal/node3.html#SECTION00380000000000000000

That’s 16 zeroes! This link will take you fairly close to Claus Tondering’s discussion of Kalends, Nones, and Ides. You’ll have to scroll through his answer to Frequently Asked Question number 2.8 (What is the Roman calendar?) to get to number 2.8.1: How did the Romans number days?

On a perfect Earth, night and day would indeed be equal at the equinox. But as human calendar makers and timekeepers have learned over the centuries, the Earth refuses to be perfect by our definitions. And that’s the problem: our definitions. They cause day to last longer than night on the equinox.

We define the equinox by what the center of the sun is doing and day and night by what the top of the sun is doing. On the equinox, the center of the sun is above the horizon for 12 hours everywhere on Earth. But because day starts when the top of the sun appears above the horizon, we start counting day a few minutes early.

And day doesn’t end until the top of the sun disappears, so it gets a few extra minutes at the other end too. Therefore the night of the equinox is doubly shortchanged. It comes closest to being equal a few days before the vernal equinox — March 16 or 17 where I live at a latitude of about 44.5 degrees north.

As if being shortchanged by our human definitions of sunrise and sunset weren’t enough, the night of the equinox loses yet a few more minutes to something called refraction. The Earth’s atmosphere bends the sun’s rays in such a way that it appears to be above the horizon before and after it actually is. At my latitude the total loss is nine or ten minutes.

But the exact lengths of day and night as defined by human beings are less important than what the Earth and sun themselves are doing. At the moment of the vernal equinox, the Earth is at a place in its orbit where it tilts neither toward nor away from the sun. But after the equinox the Northern Hemisphere begins to point ever so slightly back toward the sun.

The sun rises earlier and earlier, travels higher across the sky, and sets later each day. The result is yet longer days and shorter nights, resulting in more sunlight and warming temperatures, all of which combine to accelerate the season we define as spring.

MORE INFORMATION

U.S. Naval Observatory

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/EarthSeasons.html

If all you’re interested in is the date and time of the vernal equinox, this link offers the U.S. Naval Observatory’s official dates and times.

Windows to the Universe

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/the_universe/uts/equinox.html

This brief article doesn’t go into much detail, but there’s a color graphic that shows what’s going on at the equinox and what it looks like from the solar system and from Earth.

U.S. Naval Observatory on Equinoxes

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/equinoxes.html

The U. S. Naval Observatory offers the most detailed and authoritative explanation of why days are longer than nights at both equinoxes.

USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wequinox.htm

USA Today’s Web site is big and busy and cluttered, but it offers the best graphic to illustrate why days are longer than nights at both equinoxes Their text, however, is a bit muddy. In their effort to paraphrase what the U.S Naval Observatory says, they misstate some key points.

Bad Astronomy

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/egg_spin.html#badegg

This Web site explains away the popular misconception about being able to balance an egg on its end only at the vernal equinox. It offers fact-based information written by an astronomer whose life mission is to replace “bad astronomy” with good.

As with many of the traditions we’ve inherited from one set of ancestors or another, historians don’t know the exact origins of April Fool’s Day, but it dates back to at least 1582. That was the year Pope Gregory XIII reformed Julius Caesar’s calendar to realign it with the natural year.

Pope Gregory’s most significant reforms had to do with getting rid of the extra leap days that had accumulated and devising a more precise formula for future leap years. But he also changed the date of the New Year back to Julius Caesar’s original January 1.

Christians had been celebrating the New Year on March 25 as part of their Feast of the Annunciation, and their New Year’s activities lasted for a week, culminating on April 1. To common folk, habit and tradition seemed more real than a calender that could be changed by a Pope, so some clung stubbornly to their March 25-April 1 celebrations.

According to folklorists, the people who resisted the change — or forgot about it — became likely targets for practical jokes. They were the original April Fools, who were limited to parts of Europe at first because only some European Catholics adopted the Gregorian calendar right away.

The English didn’t adopt Pope Gregory’s changes until 1752. By that time, everyone had forgotten why April 1 was April Fool’s Day, as evidenced by a 1760 poem in Poor Robin’s Almanack: “The first of April, some do say,/Is set apart for All Fools’ Day,/But why the people call it so,/Nor I nor they themselves do know.”

If the English were confused, their American colonists had even less of a notion about why they should try to fool each other on April 1. But the practical jokes that had become the mainstay of April Fools’ traditions must have been appealing to winter weary New Englanders because even after a revolution and two hundred plus years, my friends are still April Fooling me.

MORE INFORMATION

Elaine’s April Fool’s Day Page

http://homepages.tesco.net/derek.berger/holidays/aprilfool.html

Elaine offers an attractive page full of quotations, different practices in different countries, A Fool’s Dictionary, poems, and ideas for harmless pranks.

April Fool’s Day

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/modern/aprfool_1

This Library of Congress site offers a short, kid-friendly explanation of April Fool’s Day. It includes old photos plus a video showing an old-fashioned prank.

Google Technology

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

Google had some fun creating this spoof for April Fool’s Day 2002.

April Fool’s Day – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fool’s_Day

The Wikipedia offers more information about April Fool’s Day than most of us want to know. But it does include a long list of famous hoaxes and related links.

Wind has intrigued people since the ancient Greeks decided that it was not the breath of gods but a natural flow of air. Just how fast a wind can blow, given the constraints of the earth’s atmosphere, has become the subject of increasingly high-tech research.

But the real excitement remains in witnessing the high-speed winds themselves. Alex McKenzie, who was one of the weather observers on Mount Washington the afternoon of April 12, 1934, reported that he was actually slammed against the building by the blast. The weather on Mount Washington is among the world’s worst, so when someone who works up there is impressed, we should pay attention.

We should also be grateful that they work up there. The Mount Washington Observatory offers us a clear and consistent point of reference because it’s removed from human influences, it’s at the highest elevation in the Northeast (6,288 feet), it’s continuously staffed, and it has remained in uninterrupted operation since it was established in 1932.

Hurricane watchers and tornado chasers have recorded some impressive wind speeds, but so far a hurricane has not exceeded 231 mph. And tornadoes, which have recently registered a speed of 318 mph, don’t count.

Tornado winds aren’t compared to mountain and hurricane winds because they can’t be measured at the surface. As the movie Twister so graphically showed, they’re blowing entirely too much debris. Tornado chasers use portable devices similar to police radar guns to measure wind speeds high up above the flying debris.

The hurricane that came closest to toppling Mount Washington’s record was actually a typhoon, which is what they call hurricanes in the western Pacific. In 1997, Typhoon Paka produced a wind that was measured at 236 mph. But when the instrument that measured it was tested, it wasn’t accurate enough for the record to stand.

For those of us who have witnessed only the occasional windstorms that blow through our neighborhoods — and can’t even imagine wind speeds of 231 mph and up — Mount Washington’s April 12, 1934 record-holder is still the wind to remember.

MORE INFORMATION

Mount Washington Observatory

http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/recordwind.php

The Mount Washington Observatory devotes a whole page of their Web site to their famous wind.

Wind Record Challenge – 1997

http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/recordwind-1997challenge.php

On December 16, 1997, Andersen Air Force Base, on the Pacific island of Guam, reported a gust of 236 miles per hour. If verified, that event would have established a new world record for a surface gust — a matter of scientific interest and of special interest to the Mount Washington Observatory, since the reported gust would have eclipsed the existing Mount Washington record by a small margin. As investigation of the Guam report proceeded, however, it became evident that the claim of a 236 mile per hour gust could not be substantiated.

This page provides links to some reports on the wind event on Guam. They include the early reports of the gust plus the follow-up analysis, including the final statement of the National Climate Extremes Committee, which concluded that the report of a 236 mile per hour gust was not reliable.

The days that divided the four solar quarters became known as cross-quarter days, and they occurred at key times in the agricultural year. Samhain, which was the Celtic New Year, occurred after the harvest was in, in early November. Imbolc occurred as lambs were born in early February. Beltane occurred at the time cattle were ready to be moved to summer pastures in early May. And Lughnasa occurred after the first harvest of grain in early August.

The modern calendar’s date for Beltane is May 1, and May 1 still seems worth celebrating. The Celts considered Beltane the beginning of summer, which is why they — and Shakespeare after them — thought of the summer solstice as midsummer. They also began their celebrations at night because their days began at sunset. So a modern Beltane should actually begin on April 30.

The ancient Beltane rituals included hilltop bonfires, which can be dangerous and are illegal without fire permits today. But the positive symbolism of these fires can be simulated more modestly right in your own back yard. Beltane fires were new fires ignited from scratch, and they symbolized fresh starts at the beginning of the new season. They also had the symbolic power to exorcise old ills and protect against new ones.

I like the idea of ritualized seasonal renewal, so my own modest Beltane celebration consists of cleaning my stone fire ring, picking up a few of the twigs and small branches that have fallen during the winter, and lighting my first campfire of the season with a brand new box of matches.

Others might choose to clean their grills, light them with a certain amount of ceremony — including new matches — and cook their first outdoor meal. Such modest celebrations may not seem very Celtic, but they are safe, legal, and easy ways for us modern types to greet the glories of May.

MORE INFORMATION

Crossquarter May Day

http://www.clarkfoundation.org/astro-utah/vondel/crossquartermay.html

Not many scientists write about the Celtic cross-quarter days, but this one does. As the former director of the Hansen Planetarium in Utah, he knows his astronomy — and also his weather, his natural history, and other cultures’ practices with respect to the solar year. He writes a newspaper column called “Looking Around” from which this very readable essay is adapted.

Beltane – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane

The Wikipedia article offers background information on Beltane including etymology, orgins, neopagan practices, and links to other information including an extract from Sir James George Frazer’s book The Golden Bough.