LEAP YEAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 93, 20 April 1932, Page 16

LEAP YEAR.

(By Douglas Curtin, 24, Church Street, Ponsonby; age 12.) THE CALENDAR. Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, Which hath but tweuty-eight days clear, And twenty-nine in each leap year. No doubt you have wondered, as I, why our calendar is made up in such a queer way —why February should have only 28 days in three years and 29 days in the fourth, and why nine months have such unusuai names. Account of time is reckoned by the moon. Now, a new moon occurs every 29J days, so you see that though our word "month" is named after the moon, our calendar month, which is 30 or 31 days, is really too long. The people in ancient Rome called the months simply "the first month," "the second month," and so on. Their first month was what we call March, and we still keep the Roman names for some of the months. September simply means "the seventh month." Afterwards some of the names were altered. January was named after the god Janus, March after Mars, and June after Juno, the wife of Jupiter. In twelve of these months there were only 354 days. The Romans did not like even numbers, so they put in an extra day for luck, making 305 days. But even then they were ten days short. The proper length of the year is just less than 3GSJ days, and it is necessary to keep to this number, so that summer and winter may be in their proper places. When Julius Caesar was made Emperor of Rome, he rearranged matters entirely. He said that the year should begin on the first of January, and in order to make up the year to 365 days, every month except February should have an extra day. The seventh month was called after himself, "Julius," which is our July. Julius Caesar forgot to allow for the extra quarter of a day, and it was the next Emperor, Augustus, who corrected the mistake. He commanded that in every fourth year there should be 30G days. He also named one month after himself, so he called it Augustus, or August.