Calendar

“ POPULAR MONTHS OF THE EUROPEAN PEOPLES. In ancient times, and even at the present day in lands which lie outside the path of the great leveller, civilisation, the months taken over with the Roman calendar are not numbered divisions of the year, the names of which are a matter of indifference, but are concretely conceived and named as seasons. They are, in fact, nothing but seasons, the number and duration of which are determined by the conventional calendar. ”

“ The only calendar we men have is a calendar of dates, fitted to the movements of the sun and moon. God has a calendar, too, but it is a calendar of events, not of dates. The completion of His plans doesn't depend on so many revolutions of the earth about the sun, but on the faithful revolution of His followers in their movement around the earth telling men of Jesus. ”

“ The mother counts by weeks—very good—the squire by the proper calendar. One makes the child three months and two weeks, and she is right; the other deducts eleven days to fit the calendar, and he, too, is right.”
“Out with it,” cried Caleb; “out with such a calendar! Why, the whole realm will be in confusion. None of us will ever know how old we are, or when the church-days are due; but I doubt if, in spite of it all, the Pope’s new calendar doesn’t keep the squire’s rent-day straight. They’ll look out for that.” ”

“ There can be no doubt that when there was an absence of all civilisation and a calendar of any sort was unknown, the year meant simply the succession of seasons, and that no attempt would be made to reckon any day as its commencement. ”

“ The same is the case with the knowledge of the revolutions of the spheres, of which the yearly calendar is but one fruit. The excellence of the calculation of the calendar is famous, and it is well known what deep root it has taken among these people, few in number, yet excellently equipped with model institutions. Could it be otherwise? On account of the smallness, humbleness, and dispersion of the people it is hardly noticed among the other nations, yet those relics of the Divine made it into one firmly established organization. ”

“ CALENDAR REGULATION. 1. THE INTERCALATION. The circumstance that the lunar months are among almost all peoples named from the phases of Nature involves the necessity of an agreement between the two really incommensurable periods given by the sun and the moon. This problem is the central point of the older scientific chronology. We shall now investigate more closely how the problem has arisen, and what has been its development among the primitive peoples.
Where there is only a series of less than twelve months, the problem of calendar regulation does not exist. ”

“ The calendar and practical life become to some degree separated from each other; the first lays the principal emphasis upon the correct ordering of the series of days, which is of especial importance on religious grounds for the selection of days and the fixing of the right day for the religious observances; in practical life, however, the point of chief importance is to determine the times when the various occupations may be begun and sea-voyages undertaken, both of which depend upon the solar year, and for this the stars afford the best aid. ”

“ For the sake of greater generality, the days of the week are denoted by the first seven letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, which are placed in the calendar beside the days of the year, so that A stands opposite the first day of January, B opposite the second, C opposite the third, and so on to G, which stands opposite the seventh ”

“ He called it the Gregorian Calendar; but there are lots of other calendars besides—there's the Jewish and Mohammedan, and a variety of calendars in the East. All of them can't be right. The result is that none of them are right, and the world is in confusion. Some calendars mark off too many days, others mark off too few. Half the world is ahead of Time, and the other half behind it. ”

“ These documents are all dated in such and such a month of such and such a year of some king’s reign; the months are the same (at first under their earlier Accadian names [3] ) as those we [5] find in the almanacs translated by Epping and Strassmaier, and we meet in them, and in other historical inscriptions, with the intercalary months, the second Elul, and the second Adar. It would seem, then, that it was the same calendar, worked in the same way, that held its place through these two thousand years. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION OF THE JULIAN CALENDAR BY POPE GREGORY XIII.
True enough, the year in which Julius Cæsar reformed the ancient Roman calendar was the last year of confusion, and the method adopted by him a commodious one, and answered a very good purpose for a short time; but as the years rolled on and century after century had passed away, astronomers began to discover the discrepancy between the solar and the civil year ”

“ Though confounded with calendar, it is essentially different—the latter relating to time in general, and the almanac to that of a year; but the term calendar can be properly used for a particular year. (See Ephemeris.)
ALMATH [Hamal] . The star in Aries whence the first mansion of the moon takes its name. ”

“ The publication of arranged calendar matter and the constant improvement in the same were owing chiefly to the efforts of wise men, in early Greece, for instance, to the zealous labors of the priesthood at Delphi, who justly esteemed an established calendar a potent element of national unity and order, and as a means of security against the power and influence of those fostering secret teaching. ”

“ By the new calendar the year of 365 days was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, every month being divided into three periods of ten days, each of which were called décades, and the tenth, or last, day of each decade being a day of rest. ”

“ Each third of the lunar calendar consists of 30-and 29-day months arranged in alternating sequence, with intercalary days added by the substitution of a 30-day for a 29-day month when the error arising from the nonconformity of the moon’s revolution reaches more than one day. In order that the lunar calendar might agree with the eclipse calendar more closely, these months were recorded in groups of five and six. ”

“ Use a Christmas card for an outside cover and through the two top corners of the calendar make round holes large enough to allow a silken cord, matching in color the tint of the paper, to pass through. Then fasten all the pieces of the calendar together in order, January being the first and December the last (Fig. 159) . 82As each month passes by slide that leaf back on the cords, bringing after January, for instance, February to view. Hold the two loops of cord together at the top and hang the calendar where it may be readily seen.
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“ The days marked in the calendars are those of the saints’ deaths (vid. ante, p. 213) ; but the days on which their relics were translated to some particular church are also marked as festivals in the calendar of the church in question. When in different calendars different days are given to the same saint, the date in the calendar belonging to the church where he died [347] is usually to be regarded as the day of his death; the others are days on which his relics were translated. ”

“ The days are distributed in the calendar into cycles of sixty, in the same manner as ours are distributed into weeks, or cycles of seven. Each day of the cycle has a particular name, and as it is a usual practice, in mentioning dates, to give the name of the day along with that of the moon and the year, this arrangement affords great facilities in verifying the epochs of Chinese chronology. The order of the days in the cycle is never interrupted by any intercalation that may be necessary for adjusting the months or years. ”

“ The systematising tendency which arose at the end of the kingdom of Judah, and became ever stronger during and after the Exile, necessitated a calendar. If this tendency was unrelated to practical life, it was all the more closely bound up with the religious cult. Since people were now accustomed to numbering the months, the novelty consisted in the fixing of a calendarial beginning of the year. ”

“ The Calendar, again, is usually prefaced by a figure of a man, with all the organs of his body exposed, and lines drawn from them to the celestial bodies, which, in the popular beliefs, were supposed to influence their health and sickness. Of all these illustrations five or six different varieties are found; but from 1495 to the end of the century, the set of designs which was used for our little Sarum Horae was by far the most popular, and influenced the editions of all the leading publishers. ”

“ Although it embodied the results of long-standing primitive astronomical observation and accorded with the seasons and movements of the celestial bodies, the native Calendar was primarily a governmental institution, designed to control the actions of human beings and bring their communal life in accord with the periodical movements of the heavenly bodies. ”

“ As to the New Calendar, we may say here rather than elsewhere that speculative men have long been struck with the inequalities and incongruities of the Old Calendar; that a New one has long been as good as determined on. ”

“ The Roman calendar was in early times even more confused than the Greek. There appears to have been at one time a year of either 304 or 354 days; tradition assigned to Numa the introduction of a cycle of four years, which brought the calendar into fair agreement with the sun, but made the average length of the month considerably too short. Instead, however, of introducing further refinements the Romans cut the knot by entrusting to the ecclesiastical authorities the adjustment of the calendar from time to time, so as to make it agree with the sun and moon. ”

“ Our calendar to-day is a purely solar one; our months are twelve in number, but of purely arbitrary length, divorced from all connection with the moon; and to us, the Saros cycle does not readily leap to the eye, for eclipses [123] of sun or moon seem to fall haphazard on any day of the month or year. ”

“ For the fourteenth day of Clavius is generally the fifteenth day of the mean moon of the heavens, and therefore most often that of the real moon. But for this, 1818 and 1845 would not have been the only instances of our day in which the English precept would have contradicted the Calendar.
11. In the construction of the Calendar, Clavius adopted the ancient cycle of 532 years, but, we may say, without ever allowing it to run out. At certain periods, a shift is made from one part of the cycle into another. ”

“ In consequence of the solar and lunar equations, it is evident that the epact, or moon's age at the beginning of the year, must, in the course of centuries, have all different values from one to thirty inclusive, corresponding to the days in a full lunar month. Hence, for the construction of a perpetual calendar, there must be thirty different sets or lines of epacts. ”

“ As apparently he was ignorant of any calendar of months by which the time of year might be described, he has recourse to the rising and setting of the stars, whose annual motion was known to him, to indicate the seasons of the year. ”

“ The Calendar Round, as we have seen, determined the position of a given day within a period of only 52 years. Consequently, in order to prevent confusion of days of the same name in successive Calendar Rounds or, in other words, to secure absolute accuracy in dating events, it was necessary to use additional data in the description of any date.
In nearly all systems of chronology that presume to deal with really long periods the reckoning of years proceeds from fixed starting points. ”

“ For they are the most intelligent and learned men of the tribe, and moreover the calendar is peculiarly their affair, if the development has proceeded so far that value is attached to the calendar for the selection of the proper days for the religious observances. ”

“ The re-establishment of the ancient calendar had no other object than to bring us into harmony with the rest of Europe on a point so closely connected with daily transactions, which were much embarrassed by the decadary calendar. ”

“ Experience, and to a certain extent tradition, are their only guides for telling the different seasons of the year; they have not the slightest remembrance of their ancient calendar system. They are accustomed to hear clocks strike where such exist, but otherwise, simply from the course of the sun, moon, and stars, they are able to regulate the hours of the day and night, more or less. ”

“ As all other civilised states had already adopted the Gregorian calendar, the alteration of the New Year, and the change from the old to the new calendar, was accomplished without opposition on the part of the people in England. It was only in Buckinghamshire that a rebel rising threatened, and the cause of this was an old belief which was threatened by the new calendar. ”

“ Day after tomorrow we will celebrate your Birthday as if you were present, and with our whole heart drink your health.
Here I send you a little production of my pen, which may perhaps give pleasure to my dear Mother and Sisters; for it should be at least written for ladies. In the year 1790 Wieland edited the Historical Calendar, and in this of 1791 and in the 1792 that will follow, I have undertaken the task. Insignificant as a Calendar seems to be, it is that kind of book which the Publishers can circulate the most extensively, and which accordingly brings them the best payment. ”