ed under this head with certainty--the regulation of the
calendar attempted by the decemvirs. They wished to substitute for the
previous calendar based on the old and very imperfect -trieteris-(29)
the contemporary Attic calendar of the -octaeteris-, which retained
the lunar month of 29 1/2 days but assumed the solar year at 365 1/4
days instead of 368 3/4, and therefore, without making any alteration
in the length of the common year of 354 days, intercalated, not as
formerly 59 days every 4 years, but 90 days every 8 years. With the
same view the improvers of the Roman calendar intended--while
otherwise retaining the current calendar--in the two inter-calary
years of the four years' cycle to shorten not the intercalary months,
but the two Februaries by 7 days each, and consequently to fix that
month in the intercalary years at 22 and 21 days respectively instead
of 29 and 28. But want of mathematical precision and theological
scruples, especially in reference to the annual festival of Terminus
which fell within those very days in February, disarranged the
intended reform, so that the Februaries of the intercalary years came
to be of 24 and 23 days, and thus the new Roman solar year in reality
ran to 366 1/4 days. Some remedy for the practical evils resulting
from this was found in the practice by which, setting aside the
reckoning by the months or ten months of the calendar (30) as now no
longer applicable from the inequality in the length of the months,
wherever more accurate specifications were required, they accustomed
themselves to reckon by terms of ten months of a solar year of 365
days or by the so-called ten-month year of 304 days. Over and above
this, there came early into use in Italy, especially for agricultural
purposes, the farmers' calendar based on the Egyptian solar year of
365 1/4 days by Eudoxus (who flourished 386).

Structural and Plastic Art

A higher idea of what the Italians were able to do in these
departments is furnished by their works of structural and plastic art,
which are closely associated with the mechanical sciences. Here too we
do not find phenomena of real originality; but if the impress of
borrowing, which the plastic art of Italy bears throughout, diminishes
its artistic interest, there gathers around it a historical interest
all the more lively, because on the one hand it preserves the most
remarkable evidences of an international intercourse of which other
traces have disa