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Updated: May 7, 2025
On the other hand the intercalary period recurring every four years, and the census and lustration of the community connected with it, appear to have suggested a reckoning by -lustra- similar in plan to the Greek reckoning by Olympiads a method, however, which early lost its chronological significance in consequence of the irregularity that now prevailed as to the due holding of the census at the right time.
'Our year, says the learned author of the 'Rites and Ceremonies, 'is divided into twelve lunar months, some of which consist of twenty-nine, others of thirty days, which difference is occasioned by the various appearance of the new moon, in point of time: for if it appeared on the 30th day, the 29th was the last day of the precedent month; but if it did not appear till the 31st day, the 30th was the last day, and the 31st the first of the subsequent month; and that was an intercalary moon, of all which take the following account.
The extinct Zeuglodon, however, presents us with an intercalary form between the type of the Seals and that of the Whales.
Numa reckoned the variation to consist of eleven days, as the lunar year contains three hundred and fifty-four days, and the solar year three hundred and sixty-five. He doubled these eleven days and introduced them every other year, after February, as an intercalary month, twenty-two days in duration, which was called by the Romans Mercedinus.
But want of mathematical precision and theological scruples, especially in reference to the annual festival of Terminus which fell within those very days in February, disarranged the intended reform, so that the Februaries of the intercalary years came to be of 24 and 23 days, and thus the new Roman solar year in reality ran to 366 1/4 days.
All that can be said is that, if independent evidence of the actual occurrence of evolution is producible, then these intercalary forms remove every difficulty in the way of understanding what the actual steps of the process, in the case of birds, may have been.
Cæsar inserted the regular intercalary month of twenty-three days, and two additional ones of sixty-seven days. These were added to the three hundred and sixty-five days, making a year of transition of four hundred and forty-five days, by which January was brought back to the first month of the year, after the winter solstice.
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