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been employed, by the ancients, for practical purposes. The 
facilities supplied by the Julian Period, which Scaliger 
brought into the service of chronologists,—as determining the 
place and nature of the quadrienniums of the Julian year,—are 
then insisted on, with a view to the establishment of a stan- 
dard, by a comparison with which the modes employed by dif- 
ferent nations in intercalating the year may be estimated. 
For the attainment of the object at which the author aims, 
he proceeds to distribute his subject into three parts; respect- 
ing:—1. The use and antiquity ; 2. The order; and 3. The 
intercalation of the quadrienniums as employed in the equa- 
tion of time by the principal nations of antiquity, which he 
regards as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. 
1. In this order the Egyptians are considered in the first 
place; and the authority of Manetho is cited to prove that 
they discovered the mode of intercalating the year as early as 
the time in which the dynasty of Phcenician shepherds governed 
the country. This statement is corroborated by Censorinus, 
who identifies the small canicular cycle with the quadriennium, 
of which he describes the length and intercalation. Occasion 
is thence taken to show how the small cycle of four years 
was determined by the heliacal rising of the star Sirius; and 
how the great cycle of 1460 years was constituted of 365 
lesser cycles or proper quadrienniums. From the high anti- 
quity of the great canicular cycle, that of the quadriennium, 
on which it was founded, is concluded. 
The transmission of the quadriennium from the Egyptians 
to the Greeks is then traced, and exemplified in the Olym- 
piads, which are proved from Censorinus to have consisted of 
quadrienniums properly intercalated. From the various tra- 
ditionary and historical notices of these cycles, from the times 
of Iphitus, and previously, it is shown that they were used by 
the Greeks above 900 years before the Christian era. 
From the observations which apply to the solar year, it is 
then shown in order, that according to the quadriennium, 
