Calendar

the orderly record of time. About the only units of time in use among savage people are the day and the moon. Such a moon is the rice moon, or moon for gathering wild rice. Another may be the sore-eyes moon, when the smoke of the tepee and glare of the snow bring on sore eyes. Religious ceremonies based on the time of the moon carried forward a time record, based on the month, far into civilization. Civilization reckons time in years. As the phases of the moon do not come out even with the end of the year, a year composed of new moons is out of harmony with a year based on the seasons.

We trace our calendar to the Egyptians. Whether they understood the revolution of the earth about the sun or not cannot be determined, but they noted the return of the sun to a certain position at regular intervals. This they fixed at 365 1/4 days, less a fraction. They established a system of leap years and possessed a calendar of months. This Egyptian calendar was adopted by the Romans. The pontiffs who had charge of festivals and religious observances had charge also of the official calendar. In 45 B. C. the Roman calendar had run behind nearly three months. The spring equinox was scheduled to come off in June. Caesar reformed the calendar by decreeing that the year 46, "the last year of confusion," should be prolonged to 445 days. He further ordered that three years out of four should have 365 days, and that each fourth year,--that is, each year divisible by four,--should have 366 days. This is called the Julian Calendar. According to it, each century is about three-fourths of a day too long. The new century should begin a day sooner three centuries out of four, a loss of three days every 400 years. In this way each century began farther and farther behind time. Pope Gregory, finding that the church festivals were noticeably changing in season, decreed, 1582, that the day following the fourth of October of that year should be recorded the fifteenth instead of the fifth day of the month; and to avoid future difficulty he further decreed that the last year of each century three times out of four should not be a leap year; or, put in another way, that only such century years be reckoned leap years as are divisible by 400. Accordingly, 1700, 1800, and 1900 had but 365 days, but the year 2000 will be assigned 366 days. This is known as the Gregorian Calendar.

The Gregorian Calendar was adopted in all Catholic countries and by most Protestant countries at once. England waited until 1751; then fell in with a statute that the day following the second of September be reckoned the fourteenth instead of the third. The Gregorian Calendar is followed by the commercial world; that is to say, everywhere save in Russia, in which the Greek Church adheres to the Julian Calendar for fear of impiety in setting forward church festivals. The Russian dates are thirteen days behind ours. When Alaska was taken over the difference in reckoning was added, so that the official records of Alaska would indicate that it never had a certain thirteen days at all.