APPENDIX. 119 



Henry VI II. issued a proclamation against such false 

 prognostications as this tract was intended to ridicule, 

 but still no printer ventured to put his name to it. Not 

 long after to believe them was a crime ; " as for astro- 

 logicall and other like vaine predictions or abodes," says 

 Thomas Lydiat, "I thanke God I was never addicted to 

 them." * 



Johannes de Monte-Regio, in 1472, composed the 

 earliest European almanac that issued from the press ; 

 and, before the end of that century, they became com- 

 mon on the Continent. In England they were not in 

 general use until the middle of the sixteenth century. 

 Most of the best mathematicians of the time were em- 

 ployed in constructing them ,• but, before the end of the 

 following century, almanac-makers began to form a 

 distinct body, and, though they often styled themselves 

 " studentes in the artes mathematicall," very few of them 

 were at all celebrated in the pure sciences. 



It may not be wholly irrelevant here to make some 

 few observations on the memory-rhymes found in some 

 almanacs of the present day, and which date their origin 

 to a much earlier period. The well-known lines, used by 

 many for recalling to their recollection the number of 

 days in each month, I find in Winter's Cambridge Alma- 

 nac for 1635, under the following slightly-varied form — 



" Aprill, June, and September, 

 Thirty daies have as November ; 

 Ech month else doth never vary 

 From thirty-one, save February ; 

 Wich twenty-eight doth still confine, 

 Save on Leap-yeare, then twenty-nine." 



And the nursery-rhymes, commencing " Multiplication is 

 my vexation," were certainly made before 1570.f 



* MS. Bodl. 662. 



t Professor Davies's Key to Hutton's Mathematics, p. 17. 



