EDITOR'S TABLE.
The year comes round with such perfect uniformity that we find it hard to realize how there could ever have been any great difficulty in settling either its true boundaries or its internal divisions. Any body, it seems to us, could make an almanac, as far as the calendar is concerned. Such might be the first thought, even of persons who could not justly be charged with a lack of general intelligence. But let them think again, and they will rather find cause to wonder at the immense amount of observation involved in the process of gathering, age after age, the elements of a computation apparently so simple.
Had the seasons been so strikingly marked that the transition from one to the other had been instantaneous, or had the lesser sections of time been so contrived, in the Divine wisdom, as to be exact divisors of the greater, there would have been no difficulty whatever in the problem. But the Author of nature has not made it so easy for us. Twelve moons fall short of the year; thirteen exceed it. Any monthly division, therefore, founded on the revolutions of the satellite, must require, after the lapse of a few years, an addition, or a subtraction, of a certain period, to make the seasons come round again in harmony.
The first men, unquestionably, soon learned to note the general revolution by the return of the same seasons. The earliest agricultural operations would necessitate similar estimates, and thus a general notion of the year would be arrived at without an exact knowledge of the precise number of days contained. Hence, in all languages, some such idea has entered into the name. The year is that which comes, and comes again. In Greek (if our readers will pardon a little display of learning which we have picked up for the occasion) it is (ἔτι ἜΤΟΣ ἕτερος) another and yet another. In the Hebrew it is repetition. In our own, and the northern tongues generally, the word in all its forms (year, gear, jahr, jaar, &c.) ever denotes a course (currus) or circle.
Another mode was by rude astronomical observations, which must have been resorted to in the very earliest periods. For a good portion of the year, the sun was seen to come regularly north. Then he remained apparently stationary; and then, slowly turning, made his retreat again to the southern limit, there to perform the same movement—and so on without interruption or variation. Hence the word tropic, signifying the turning, and of which St. James makes so sublime and beautiful a use when he tells us (James i. 17) that the Unchangeable Spiritual Sun, or “Father of Lights,” has no parallax[6] and no “shadow of turning,” or tropical shadow, as it should be rendered, referring to the mode of determining the period of turning by the shortest shadow cast by a perpendicular object. Still all this was merely an approximation to the length of the year, but with errors which only repeated observations could correct. By taking, however, a large number of these self-repeating repeating phenomena for a divisor, and the whole number of carefully ascertained days for a dividend, the error in each case would be diminished in an inverse ratio; so that we should not wonder that the number of three hundred and sixty-five days was fixed upon at quite an early period.
[6] The word parallax, or “parallage,” here must refer to the sun’s declination north and south of the equator. We have no reason for supposing that the ideas connected with the term in modern astronomical science were at all known to the Apostle. It may, however, be taken generally, for any deviation from one unchangeable position, and, in such a sense, preserve all the beauty and sublimity of the metaphor.
Such estimates, too, were aided by collateral observations of the stars. Let any one look out upon the heavens some clear night at the commencement of the year, and he can not help being struck with the position as well as the brilliancy of certain constellations. Over head are the Pleiades, the lone Aldebaran, Perseus, and Capella. Coming up the eastern sky are Orion, Gemini, Sirius, the Lesser Dog. Descending in the western are Andromeda, Pegasus, Capricornus, the Southern Fish. While low down toward the setting horizon are the Harp, the Eagle, and the Swan. Two weeks later, at the same time in the evening, he will find them all farther westward. In a month the change will be still more marked. After three months, those that before were just rising are on the meridian, and those that were then on the meridian are now setting. In six months, an entirely new host of stars will adorn the firmament, and at the end of a year, all the same phenomena will be found to have come round again. Our minuteness of detail may seem like trifling in an age so scientific as this; but it is astonishing how much our science is the science of books, and how little, after all, especially in astronomy, there is of personal acquaintance with the objects whose laws we know so well in theory. How many understand thoroughly the doctrine of transits and parallaxes, and even the more difficult laws of celestial influences, as laid down in scientific treatises, and yet, to save their lives, could not tell us what stars are now overhead, or what planets are now visible in our nightly heavens. They have read of Jupiter, they know the dimensions of Jupiter, and have even calculated the movements of Jupiter, it may be, but Jupiter himself they never saw. They would be surprised, perhaps, to discover, by actual sight, how much, in respect to position and appearance, our wintry constellations differ from those that are visible in summer; although night after night, for years and years, the brilliant phenomena have been passing over their heads, and silently, yet most eloquently, inviting their observation. This should not be so. The names and locations of the stars should ever be a part of astronomical instruction. We should learn them, if only for their classical reminiscences—for the sublime pleasure of having such a theme for contemplation in our evening walks. How easy, in this way, to fill the heavens with life, when we are led to regard them no longer as an unmeaning collection of glittering points, or what is scarcely better, a mere diagram for the illustration of scientific abstractions, but stored with remembrances of the older days of our world—the old religion, the old mythology, the old philosophy pictured on the sky—the old heroes, and heroines, and heroic events, transferred to the stars, and still shining in immortal splendor above us.
But to return from our digression—any one may see how such an observation of the stars furnished a second mode of ascertaining the length of the year. The men of the olden time were driven to this earnest watching of the heavens by an interest, of which, in these days of almanacs, and clocks, and compasses
we can form but an inadequate conception. The period of the year was named after the principal star that rose just before, or set just after the sun. For example, when Sirius rose and set with or near the time of the sun, it was called the “dog days”—the only one of these old sidereal measures of time that has come down to us. Another season was under the sway of Orion. It was called the “stormy constellation,” and at its heliacal rising, or when, as Hesiod expresses it,