ORIGIN OF THE NAME. 



3. The almanack is a year-book, and is published before the 

 commencement of the year whose date it bears, and to which its 

 contents are related. 



The contents of the almanack are, therefore, necessarily 

 predictions. 



The prediction of fixed anniversaries, whether civil, religious or 

 natural, requires no calculation, since they fall from year to year 

 upon the same days. The recurrence of many celestial pheno- 

 mena, which are of great popular and civil interest, varies from 

 year to year ; and some religious and civil festivals and observances 

 which are conventionally regulated by them, are subject to a 

 like variation, and the prediction of the days of their recurrence 

 depends on similar calculations. 



4. The people of all classes in all countries seeing the precision 

 with which so many and such various phenomena were foretold, 

 were not slow to manifest a craving after like predictions of 

 events of quite another order ; and almanack makers were not 

 and are not even now wanting who pander to this demand. We 

 have, accordingly, almanacks including predictions of the vicissi- 

 tudes of weather, of the occurrence of great political events, and 

 in short of everything which can be imagined to gratify the 

 spurious appetite of the credulous. It must be admitted, to the 

 discredit of certain of our public bodies, that they have long con- 

 descended to traffic in this sort of charlatanism, and to derive a 

 revenue from thus imposing on public credulity. If precedent, 

 however, can be admitted as any extenuation of this practice, they 

 may claim to have sinned in good company, for Arago relates 

 that he had the following anecdote from Lagrange. 



"The Berlin Academy, so celebrated for the vastness of physical 

 discoveries and researches which were consigned to its trans- 

 actions, formerly derived its chief revenue from the circulation of 

 its almanack. This publication from an early period included a 

 mass of pretended predictions of meteorological phenomena and 

 political events, like those which figure in some of our own 

 almanacks of much more recent date. Ashamed of sanctioning 

 the publication of such absurdities, the Academy, upon the pro- 

 position of one of its leading members, resolved at one time upon 

 suppressing them and supplying their place with more rational 

 and useful matter. 



' ' The immediate consequence of the reform was the almost total 

 suspension of the revenues of the Academy by the great decrease 

 of the sale of the almanack, so that the learned body was literally 

 starved into compliance with the public demand, and compelled to 

 reissue annually a collection of pretended predictions which were 

 a subject of ridicule to those who invented and compiled them." 



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