It is well known that, before the Julian reformation of the calendar, the Roman was a lunar year, which was brought, or was meant to be brought, into harmony with the solar by the insertion of an intercalary month. The great Joseph Scaliger, with that piercing eye which converts the declarations of such as know not what they are saying into evidence of truth, discovered the original system of this computation with indisputable certainty. He has shewn that the principle was to intercalate a month, alternately of 22 and 23 days, every other year during periods of twenty-two years, in each of which periods such an intercalary month was inserted ten times, the last biennium being passed over. As five years made a lustre, so five of these periods made a secle of 110 years.

The notion that Italy was in a state of barbarism, and that science was first introduced there through the intercourse between Rome and Greece, must give way, when on the contrary we see this easy and regular computation of time so entirely forgotten in the very age of literary refinement, that Cæsar found the year 67 days in advance of the true time, and was forced to borrow his reformation of the calendar from foreign science.