42 Interesting Data about the English Calendar. 
fourth year, and the accumulated twenty-four hours became a 
new day in these leap years, and was inserted after the 24th 
of February. This arrangement was correct in principle, but 
a small error in practice brought back the old disorder, and 
threatened, in coming ages, to interrupt the regular recurrence 
of the great astronomical periods. 
Let us attempt an explanation. The true solar year is not 
365 days 6 hours long, but is about eleven minutes shorter. 
To intercalate, then, every fourth or leap year twenty-four 
hours, or a whole day, is to insert about forty-five minutes too 
much ; or, which is the same thing, is to insert the day forty-five 
minutes too soon, and therefore it hastens by that amount of 
time the coming of any particular date; say, for instance, the 
vernal equinox, on the 21st of March. ‘This date well illus- 
trates the point, for it was in reference to it that the Julian 
calendar had to give way to the modern reform of Pope Gregory. 
Let us start with the Council of Nice, A.D: 325, in which year 
the equinox coincided with its true date, March 21st, and but 
for this annual excess of eleven minutes in reckoning, it would 
continue always to fall on that day. The true year, however, 
being eleven minutes shorter than the calendar year, it is plain 
that the vernal equinox would anticipate its calendar recurrence 
by this number of minutes every year, or by forty-five minutes 
every fourth year; and in about 130 years it would anticipate 
it by a whole day. That is to say, in A.D. 455 the equinox 
would fall on March zoth; in a.p. 585 it would fall on March 
rgth, and so on for all subsequent intervals of 130 years. To 
rectify such a mistake as this, we must needs drop a day in 
A.D. 455, and call March zoth the 21st; or, if neglected then, 
we must drop two days in A.D. 585, and call March roth 
the 21st. 
This is the exact result of the practical error in the Julian 
reckoning, and what was actually done in his reform of the 
calendar by Gregory XIII. in the year a.p. 1582, at which time 
the discrepancy amounted to few days. The Pope ordered the 
ten days to be dropped in that year by calling the 5th of 
October the 15th, thus bringing the solar and calendar years 
together. To keep them together in future, while he kept the 
old leap-year system, he introduced a compensating device, 
which averages the losses and the gains, and balances the scheme. 
This was to make the century years, such as 1700, 1800, 1900, 
2100, etc., non-leap years, except every fourth century, such as | 
1600, 2000, etc., which were to remain leap-years. This scheme 
keeps the calendar right for all future time. , 
The Papal countries of Europe at once adopted the Gre- 
gorian calendar, or new style; but England persisted in ignoring 
a 
