Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 April 1896 — The Gregorian Calendar. [ARTICLE]

The Gregorian Calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, first substituted for the Julian calendar in 1582, allows the ordinary year 365 days, the leap year 366 days, and drops three leap years in every four centuries, only those centennial years which are divisible by 400 being leap years. The mean year of our time-reckoning by this system," while sufficiently accurate to satisfy most individuals, is still twenty-six seconds longer than the true astronomical year. This has Jed a learned member of the French Academy of Sciences to propose a further correction of the calendar by' considering every year divisible by 3200 as an ordinary instead of a leap year, thus reducing the error in our mean year to one day in 500,000 years. If the change is adopted, the first departure from the Gregorian rule will not occur for more than 1200 years.