The Week 55 



furnishes ample proof that the week is felt by every one to 

 be too long. 



Now the lunar synodic cycle is twenty-nine days and a 

 little over a half. A weekly cycle therefore of six days, or 

 five days, would synchronise with the lunar cycle much more 

 nearly than any division of twenty-eight could possibly do ; 

 if it were any object to conform to a lunar period at all. I 

 recommend the quinary rather than the sexenary cycle. It 

 would concur better with the denary scale now in use in 

 notation and computation ; it would leave no odd day over 

 in an ordinary year ; and I believe it would better pro- 

 portion hard labour to rest. If any man works his best for 

 four full days continuously, I think that he will be quite ready, 

 and that it will be good for him, to rest on the fifth. This 

 is all that would really be necessary, except the rigorous 

 preservation of the fifth day as a day of rest from labour ; 

 and of intellectual cultivation, for which one day in five 

 would be little enough, though infinitely better than any 

 evening after a hard day's work. 



But the proposed change would not be nearly such a 

 startling innovation as it might at first sight appear. By 

 having a complete universal holiday, on one day in five, 

 instead of one day and a half (but the half-day neither 

 universal nor complete) in seven, there would be really a 

 difference of but one seventieth. That is, there would be in 

 seventy days — at four working days and one rest day to the 

 week — fourteen complete days of rest ; and at five and a 

 half working days and one and a half rest days to the week, 

 fifteen days of rest. My plan would thus subtract just 

 one-seventieth of rest from those who get more than they 

 require, but would secure to those who really want it the real 

 equivalent of the half day which noiv they cannot get. 



But the advantages of making the months of a uniform 

 length of thirty days or six weeks each, leaving an odd week, 

 and in leap year also an odd day, for an annual festival to 

 welcome the new year, are so very clear and great, as to 



Owen has concluded to have been physiologically impossible, may really be 

 a symbolical record of the numerous attempts to discover the true length of 

 the annual cycle ; and that Enoch the perfect man who was taken and 

 accepted by God, and who lived just three hundred and sixty-Jive years, 

 represents the epoch when that was discovered to be the true number of 

 days in the year, and the calendar was thenceforward upon that basis taken 

 and accepted as perfect. I am of course aware that the record refers to no 

 specific date, and that it was promulgated and perhaps written after the 

 10th Century, B.C. 



