ook the matter in hand and put things into better order.
He abolished all attempt to record by the calendar a lunar year of
twelve lunar months; he fixed the length of the civil year to agree as
near as might be with that of the solar year, and arbitrarily altered
the months; in fact, abandoned the "lunar month" and instituted the
"calendar month." Thus he decreed that the ordinary year should be 365
days, but that every fourth year (which, for some perverse reason, we
call "leap" year) should have an extra day. He ordered that the
alternate months, from January to November inclusive, should have
thirty-one days and the others thirty days, excepting February, which
was to have in common years twenty-nine, but in every fourth year (our
leap year) thirty. This perfectly reasonable, though arbitrary,
definition of the months was accompanied by the alteration of the name
of the month Quintilis to Julius, in honour of the great man. Later
Augustus had the name of the month Sextilis altered to Augustus for
his own glorification, and in order to gratify his vanity a law was
passed taking away a day from February and putting it on to August, so
that August might have thirty-one days as well as July, and not the
inferior total of thirty previously assigned to it! At the same time,
so that three months of thirty-one days might not come together,
September and November were reduced to thirty days, and thirty-one
given to October and December. In order to get everything into order
and start fair Julius Caesar restored the spring equinox to March 25th
(Numa's date for it, but really four days late). For this purpose he
ordered two extraordinary months, as well as Numa's intercalary month
Mercedonius, to be inserted in the year 47 B.C., giving that year in
all 445 days. It was called "the last year of confusion." January 1st,
forty-six years before the birth of Christ and the 708th since the
foundation of the city, was the first day of "the first Julian year."

Although Julius Caesar's correction and his provisions for keeping the
"civil" year coincident with the astronomical year were admirable, yet
they were not perfect. His astronomer, by name Sosigenes, did his
best, but assumed the astronomical year to be 11 min. 14 sec. longer
than it really is. In 400 years this amounts to an error of three
days. The increasing disagreement of the "civil" and the "real"
equinox was noticed by learned men in successive centuries. At last,
in A.