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year.

year are each important to us; and pletely out of harmony with the solar when each insists upon being the sole standard of measurement, what else are we going to do about it?

Up to the time when our present form of calendar was adopted, all peoples, with the exception of the Egyptians, went strictly by the moon. A month was a month, an average duration of 29 days; and it was of no very vital concern to them that twelve of those months amounted to only 354 days instead of a proper year.

To a people adopting a form of calendar the exact length of the year seems to be of no great importance. The year, with its four seasons, is supposed to bring a progressive change of climate; but when we consider that mere spells of weather make irruptions upon the seasonable climate and set the year backward or forward by days and weeks, an astronomer's information as to the exact number of days in a year would seem to be of mere academic interest.

But an exact foreknowledge of the phases of the moon is of immediate and practical importance. Besides lighting the way for travelers and holy pilgrims, and thus making itself of prime importance in the regulations of religion and commerce, the moon was so obvious a timepiece, and so easily determined in its comings and goings, that it naturally became the first standard of measurement. A discrepancy of a week or two between twelve lunar months and the length of a solar year would appear to make no great difference in practical life.

But such a discrepancy is cumulative. The error keeps growing; it adds to itself year after year; and pretty soon it amounts to months. The inevitable result is that the months rotate through the seasons. And no people, whether herdsmen or planters, can afford to go by dates that are com

It was a puzzling prospect that opened up before the eyes of our forefathers when, after much effort to construct a satisfactory calendar, they discovered the true nature of the difficulty. They made use of months that lasted from moon to moon; but no particular number of moons fitted into a year! When they tried twelve there was a considerable remainder of time which that twelvemonth did not fill out; consequently, their first month of the year, starting eleven days before the actual solar year was ended, would cause a falling behind of the season with regard to the supposed date. Each year would fall farther behind, the result being that the months revolved rapidly through the year. The practical effect of this was that a winter holiday, such as our Christmas, would get around to midsummer; and all the while they were carefully observing its month and date! And a summer festival would work its way, perforce, to the middle of winter! This was very embarrassing. It not only made an undesirable state of affairs with regard to religious and other holidays, but it was confusing to the planter, a certain day of the month meaning nothing in his line of endeavor.

This harassing state of affairs prevailed among the early Greeks and Romans and troubled the mind of the world generally. It continued to work confusion at Rome up to the time the present form of calendar was adopted. When Julius Cæsar took over the solar year from the Egyptians, computed time at Rome had gained eighty days on actual time. And yet the priests had been accustomed to throwing an extra month into the year whenever it seemed to need it, after the manner of a crew dressing the ballast in a ship.

One might easily suggest that, if a

lunar twelvemonth is eleven days short of the actual year, it would only be necessary to add these eleven days to the end of the year or distribute them among the months. This suggestion is really foolish. It would put the month out of step with the moon; and what use would a lunar calendar be in that case? It must be borne in mind that a calendar must go absolutely by the moon or absolutely by the sun, else it will run completely astray and be no calendar at all. The ancients managed very cleverly so far as the moon was concerned. A complete lunation is approximately 29 days. Their months therefore had twenty-nine and thirty days alternately. By following this rule strictly they struck an average that kept in close step with the moon and only needed a day thrown in at long intervals to correct the slight error. This was the practice of the Greeks. The problem was to find a way to correct this calendar to correspond with the annual journey of the sun and yet not get out of step with the moon. They could have lunar months which rambled through the seasons in a most confusing way, or they could have a year which was fairly true to the sun, but with months that had no relation to the moon. And it is not in human nature to be satisfied with either.

It was a great day in the history of humanity when the astronomer Meton, of Athens, made his observation that once in nineteen years the sun and moon come round to the same relative position in the heavens. This means that the new moon, or any other phase of the moon, falls upon the same time or season that it did nineteen years before.

Here was an astronomic fact that was due to be taken advantage of. In this total time of nineteen years he counted just 235 lunations. This was a happy coincidence for the purposes of a

lunar calendar. At last it was found that the sun does do something, complete, in exactly the same time that it takes the moon to do it. As a matter of fact, the 235 lunations take nineteen years and two hours; but the coincidence was sufficient for the purpose.

The problem had always been to get the moon into step with the sun without breaking a month to do it, and thus getting out of step with the moon. And when it is noted that any certain number of lunations equals any certain number of solar years, the problem is on its way to solution.

The period consisted of 6940 days. All that remained was to divide this period into years of twelve and thirteen lunar months. As twelve lunar months are less than a solar year, and thirteen are in excess of a solar year, either one is approximately correct. And the problem was to mix these years in such proportion that their total would come out even with the lunisolar period. It was found that by having seven of these thirteen-month years, or leap years, distributed among the nineteen the proper total was made up. Through all these years, whether of twelve or thirteen months, the moon was strictly followed by the alternation of twenty-nine-day and thirty-day months, except at intervals when an extra thirty-day month was used by way of correction.

To the modern mind such years would be far from satisfactory; for twelve of them in each nineteen-year period had 354 days, while the seven leap years had 384 days, due to the extra thirty-day month. But they were not trying to have solar years. This is a mathematical impossibility so long as you are observing lunar months. Their problem was simply to have a system of correction, on a true astronomical basis, which would hold them in an approximate relation to the sun and

would keep their months from rotating through the seasons.

Heretofore a month had been but an uncertain craft for a man to trust himself to upon the sea of time. It had a way of floating clean off its bearing so that man and month were lost together. And when the date belied the season there was no certain and set formula to bring them into some recognized relation again. But this nineteen-year coincidence a recurring basis of correction was like having a row of stakes driven for you all across the blue of eternity. It was only necessary to figure out a formula for getting from one to the other; and this was done by having the thirteen-month years to hold the months and the seasons in approximate relation till the nineteen-year goal was reached. After that the formula could be repeated, and the problem was solved forever!

This calendar, a memorable invention, was made public at the Olympic games on July 16 of the year 432 B.C. and acclaimed by the people. Thereafter the number of each year, from one to nineteen, was engraved on pillars of marble in letters of gold'; and in church calendars after the beginning of the Christian era the Metonic number of each year was printed in golden ink. It is the same Golden Number which we find in the modern prayer-book in connection with the rule for finding the date of Easter. The calendarmaker could hardly get along without it.

The Jewish calendar is essentially the same as this old Greek calendar, being based upon the Metonic cycle and the alternating months of twentynine and thirty days. It differs a little in the management of the leap years and common years, there being three lengths of each; but the end attained and the principle are the same. The Mohammedans cling to it religiously.

The Romans, if they had strictly observed the rules of the Metonic calendar, instead of altering figures upon the basis of superstition, would no doubt have found it fairly satisfactory. But they made a complete mess of it; and Julius Cæsar solved the problem by adopting the Egyptian method, which makes the sun the standard. When this was done the moon was cast utterly aside necessarily. A solar calendar

cannot serve two masters.

In establishing the solar calendar Cæsar took advice from the astronomers at Alexandria and made the length of the year 365 days, which is slightly in excess of the true period. In 1582 the error of about eleven minutes per year had accumulated until it amounted to ten days. This shifting of the date away from the season became undesirable because it brought Easter and all the other movable festivals at a wrong time. Pope Gregory XIII corrected it, making the fifth of October the fifteenth, 1582. And in order that the error might not grow to such size again he ordained that every year of even hundreds should not be counted a leap year, excepting every fourhundredth, beginning with the year 2000. In Catholic countries the change was promptly adopted; but in the Protestant world the people refused to take advice from the Pope even though he was dealing with a mere matter of arithmetic. It was not till 1751, after nearly two centuries of inconvenience, that Great Britain and her dependencies gave in. By that time the error was eleven days; and September 3, 1752, was called September 14.

IV

Viewing our present proposals for calendar reform in the light of history, we cannot but be struck by the fact that there is no call for astronomical

correction. Our scheme of time measurement, substantially the same as it was in the year 45 B.C., and only slightly corrected in 1582, is astronomically perfect.

When Julius Cæsar made months of thirty-one days purely upon a basis of superstition, it really was no great matter from a scientific standpoint. The month was no longer an astronomical unit; the moon had utterly passed out as a standard of measurement. Of our present proposed plans, that known as the Astronomer's has great standing in Europe; and that has a thirty-oneday month in every quarter. Its advantage over the present calendar is that a difference of from one to two days in the lengths of the quarter-years is done away with; and that is all. It is a difference which would probably be taken account of by statisticians or in certain business transactions. While many of the features of calendar reform win our assent at once, we scarcely know what attitude to take when we find the continuity of the week broken into and our relations with the past again put out of joint. The length of the month is of no importance astronomically; it is purely a matter of taste or business convenience. Astronomically the calendar is perfect; and it was made so by astronomers who had no observatories in the modern sense, and who made all their discoveries with the naked eye.

Of the great naked-eye astronomers I hardly know whether to give my admiration to Meton, who made the moon practical for human use, or to Hipparchus or to Copernicus. Meton was very useful to the world, but beyond his connection with the lunar calendar we know little about him. Hipparchus, who lived in the second

century before Christ, was the first of whom we have reliable record; and he is accounted the founder of scientific astronomy. He explained the precession of the equinoxes, and was the first to discover from direct observation of the sun that the length of the year is somewhat less than 365 days. Copernicus was of the modern speculative type, which strikes out and concerns itself with God's own business. Purely in his mind's eye, and with no proof beyond appearances that were open to all, he saw a world-machine which, as was proved by later discovery, was very much like the one which God Himself had invented.

We are so accustomed to think of astronomy in connection with the modern observatory that when we read of Copernicus and his discoveries we naturally see him viewing the heavens through a telescope-forgetting, of course, that he never heard of such a thing. It is difficult for us to imagine an astronomer as mere 'unaccommodated man' standing forth and searching the sky on his own two feet, as it were. Even the astronomers who helped Gregory XIII to correct the system of leap years in 1582, when Shakespeare and Cervantes were living and Luther had not long been dead, had no notion of such a thing as a telescope. Their only lenses were the ones God gave them; and so it was with all the great astronomers who lived and died before them.

Consider well, then, the calendar on the wall. It came down to us, just as it is, from the days of paganism! It owes little to modern astronomy and nothing whatever to the telescope. And, except for the fact that Cæsar did not start it on the day of the winter solstice, it is astronomically perfect!

TAKING THE PROFIT OUT OF WAR

BY BERNARD M. BARUCH

[The February issue of the Atlantic for 1925 carried a paper by Mr. Sisley Huddleston dealing with the general subject of 'taking the profit out of war,' which Mr. Huddleston called 'An American Plan for Peace.' The first-quoted phrase was put into the language by the War Industries Board toward the close of the World War through its efforts to eliminate all war profits. Mr. Huddleston's article came to the attention of Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board and administrator of the non-profit plan, and (as he writes us), since it seemed to indicate a growing interest in the idea, induced him to invoke practical means to bring about a full comprehension of taking the profit out of war in the various great countries of the world. To this end he responded to a suggestion of Mr. Owen D. Young, of the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, that he establish a course of lectures there to expound the War Industries Board plan in detail. Later he will proceed to make similar arrangements at leading universities in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Agreeing with Mr. Baruch that the subject calls for public knowledge and discussion, it was natural for the Atlantic to turn to him for the following paper. - THE EDITORS]

I

WAR was once described as Prussia's creating an economic detestation of most profitable industry.

It needs only a scant examination of history to learn that other countries were open to the same indictment. The methods of the Robber Barons did not pass with the end of feudalism. Annexation by conquest did not cease. But when America entered the World War, President Wilson fathered a doctrine that shall always govern us that never a foot of territory would be added to our boundaries by force.

So, as America has taken the lead toward making impossible national profit through war, it too may be America's privilege to point the way toward making impossible individual profit through war. To take the profit out of war is to take a long step toward

war. The experience of the United States in the World War affords a basis for the belief that the plan herein discussed is practical. In fact, it is more than a belief- it is a certainty, although not widely known.

The world is such a busy place, and the radius of human activity has been so greatly enlarged because of modern inventions, that it is not strange that there are but few people who are conversant with what was quietly but effectively taking place in this country in the mobilization and use of its material resources in the World War - a process that would have eventually eliminated all improper profits.

Strength is given to the public advocacy of industrial mobilization made

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