The Calendar: Its History, Structure, and Improvement

Abstract

THIS is not the kind of work that we expect from the Cambridge University Press. It contains numerous historical errors, and is not free from astronomical errors also. The author has endeavoured to guard against criticism of the latter by stating in his preface that his astronomical facts have been derived from the commonly available sources, and that he has disregarded “qualifying refinements known to modern astronomy but irrelevant to a calendrial purpose.” This ambition has not prevented him, however, from stating the length of the tropical year to hundredths of a second, or the length of 4000 tropical years to an exact number of minutes. The introduction of these refinements, “irrelevant to a calendrial purpose,” might have been pardoned, if they were accurate, which, unfortunately, they are not. But it is in the history of the calendar that the defects of the book are particularly displayed. The author ignores the two most valuable treatises on the subject, Ideler's “Handbuch der Mathematischen und Technischen Chronologic,” and Ginzel's work which bears the same title. He writes in an easy way of Egyptian, Chaldean, and Chinese calendars; obut his knowledge of things “Chaldean” may be gauged,by a footnote on p. 4, part of which is repeated in a footnote on p. 48. We quote the fuller note: “The 365-day year appeared at Babylon from Egypt after the overthrow of the Assyrian Empire by Nabonassar; but Chaldea subsequently developed a luni-solar, Egypt a solar, calendar.” Comment is superfluous.

The Calendar: Its History, Structure, and Improvement.

Alexander

Philip

By. Pp. xii + 104. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1921.) 7s. 6d. net.