The gentle Pleiads, shunning his fierce pursuit,
Sank late in the Ocean wave—
then was the ship to be drawn up into the well-secured harbor, and the sailor for a season to shun the dangerous deep. In the same way the periods of different agricultural operations were assigned to different constellations—some to Arcturus, others to the humid Hyades, and others, again, to the Bull, who “opened the year with his golden horns.” From the observed fact of simultaneousness arose, also, the notion of some secret causative influence between the concurrent events. Hence those views of astrology, so early and so widely held among mankind, and which assigned to each event its celestial concomitants, and to each individual man his natal star. Exploded it may have been by the modern progress, but there was nevertheless at bottom an idea of more value than any science, however accurate, that does not give it the first and highest place. It was the thought of the absolute unity of nature, and of the unbroken relation of every part of the universe to every other part—in other words, the sublime idea which the oldest philosophy strove to express by that grand word, Kosmos.
The length of the year, as a whole number, was early known. It was some time, however, before the disturbance created by the fraction began to be distinctly perceived, and still longer before it was reduced to any thing like satisfactory measurement. In the division of the 365 days into monthly periods, lay at first the greatest difficulty. The lunar number was in general employed, not only as the nearest marked divisor, but because the new and full moons were so generally connected with religious festivals whether this arose from convenience of arrangement, or from the idea of some deep religious meaning symbolized by the ever dying and reviving phases of this mysterious planet. We can not, however, help being struck with the superior accuracy of the Jewish, when compared with the confusion and change that prevailed in the Greek and Roman calendar.
No reader of the Bible can avoid remarking its extreme particularity of date. The oldest and, on this account, the most striking instance is in the narration of the flood: “In the 600th year of Noah, in the second month, and on the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” And so also in respect to its close. There is the same particularity, too, in the date of the Passover, of the Exodus, of the arrival at Sinai, of various events in the wilderness, of the wars and settlement of Canaan, of the building and dedication of the temple, and of the messages of the later prophets. The first would seem to present the most unanswerable proof that the Jewish computation had been derived from an antediluvian science that must have been of a higher kind than we are generally disposed to acknowledge. With all their mathematics, and with some attainments in astronomy to which the Jew could make no pretension, the calendar of the Greeks presents the appearance of far more confusion. Herodotus, after saying that the Egyptians first found out the year, and divided it into twelve parts by means of the stars, praises their arrangement (which was probably the same with, or derived from, that of the Patriarchical times) as being much more easy and correct than the division of the Greeks. “The Egyptians,” he says, “divide the year into twelve months of thirty days each; and then, by adding five days to each year, they have a uniform revolution of time; whereas the Greeks, for the sake of adjusting the seasons accurately, add every third year an intercalary month” (Herod. ii. 4). By this, however, they seem only to have made “confusion worse confounded.” The great difficulty of the Greeks arose from the attempt to do what the wiser Egyptians and Hebrews seem to have abandoned—namely, to divide the year solely by lunar months. By arbitrary intercalations, it is true, they could bring the solar and lunar years to a tolerable agreement, but then, their effect was continually to change the places of the months relatively to the seasons. The periods of intercalation were at first every two years, then three, and lastly four, and eight. In the two latter they seem to have been governed by some respect to the quadrennial return of the great Olympic games, and the Olympiads corresponding thereto. The computation of the year was afterward brought to a still greater degree of accuracy by what was called the cycle of Melon, which, by embracing a period of nineteen years brought the times of the new and full moon to fall again, very nearly, on the same days of each month.
With the Romans it was still worse. Nothing shows how much better they understood fighting than astronomy, than the way they managed their year. Under Romulus it was said to have consisted of only ten months. It is not easy to see how this could be adjusted on any mode of computation, and yet the numerical names, some of which have come down to our own calendar, would seem to present some proof of it. The last month in the year is yet called December, or the Tenth. In the days of Numa it consisted of twelve lunar months, with a system of intercalation something like that of the Greeks. The two added months were January and February, which, in numerical order would have been Undecember, and Duodecember, or the Eleventh and Twelfth. The year, however, by the clumsiness of these methods, and by the whole matter being left in the hands of the Pontifices who seem to have had little science, and still less honesty, became turned so completely topsy-turvy, that instead of being put at the end, these two new months were finally arranged at the beginning. The first was called January from the great (some say the greatest) Latin deity, Janus, whose original name was Djanus or Di-annus, The God of the Year (similar to the Greek Kronos or Time), and who was most expressively represented with two faces, one ever looking back upon the past, and the other forward to the coming period.
In the hands of the Pontifices the Roman year had again been getting more and more out of order, until, in the days of Julius Cæsar, the first of January had retrograded nearly to the autumnal equinox. This very useful despot determined to take the matter in his own hands, and make a thorough reform; but, as a preliminary, was obliged to have an extraordinary year of 445 days, which was called the year of confusion. Before this, there had been, too, a continual neglect of the fraction of a day, although its existence seems to have been known at a much earlier period. Cæsar arranged the months as they now stand, and made provision for the fraction by ordering a day to be added to February every fourth year. This seemed to answer every purpose, until, after the lapse of more than fourteen centuries, it was found that the seasons
began to disagree with the almanac, and the religious festivals to fall somewhat out of place. The error was estimated to amount to eleven days; the correction of which was assumed by the Roman Pontifex, but with the aid of a science far more accurate than had been possessed by the Pontifices of the older time. The modes now adopted, for preserving accuracy in future, are known to most well-informed readers, so that we shall not dwell upon them farther than to say, that they consist generally in such omissions of the leap year, from time to time, as will correct the very small excess by which a quarter of a day exceeds the actual fraction of the tropical year.
“And God said—Let there be lights in the firmament of Heaven, and let them be for days, and for years, and for times, and for seasons.” It requires some thought before we can fully realize how much we are indebted, morally and mentally, as well as physically, to these time-measuring arrangements. We must place ourselves in the condition of the savage before we can know how much of our civilization comes from the almanac, or, in other words, our exact divisions of time aiding the idea and the memory—thus shaping our knowledge, or thinking, and even our emotions, so as to make them very different from what they might have been, had we not possessed these regulators of our inner as well as our outer man. How unlike, in all this, must be the life of the untaught children of the forest! Let us endeavor to fancy men living from age to age without any known length or divisions of the year—no lesser or greater periods to serve as landmarks, or, rather, sky-marks, in their history—and, therefore, without any possibility of really having any history. Summer and winter come and go, but to the savage all the future is a chaos, and all the past is
With the years beyond the flood,
unmarked by any intervals which may give it a hold upon the thoughts or the memory. The heavenly bodies make their monthly, and annual, and cyclical revolutions, but their eternal order finds no correspondence in his chaotic experience. The stars roll nightly over his head, but only to direct his steps in the wilderness, without shedding a ray of light upon the denser wilderness of his dark and sensual mind. The old man knows not how many years he has lived. He knows not the ages of his children. He has heard, indeed, of the acts of his fathers; but all are equally remote. They belong to the past, and the past is all alike—a dark back-ground of tradition, without any of that chronological perspective through which former ages look down upon us with an aspect as life-like and as truthful as the present. The phenomena of the physical world have been ever flitting like shadows before his sense, but the understanding has never connected them with their causes, never followed them to their sources, never seen in them any ground of coherence or relation, simply because time, the great connective medium of all inductive comparison, has been to him an undivided, unarranged, and, therefore, unremembered vacancy. Hence it is, he never truly learns to think, and, on this account, never makes progress—never rises of himself from that low animal state to which he may once have fallen, in his ever downward course from the primitive light and truth. Æschylus, in the Prometheus, makes such to have been the first condition of mankind. But, however false his theory in this respect—opposed as it is to the sure teachings of revelation—nothing can be truer to the life than the fancy picture he has given us—