Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 January 1875 — The Beginning of the Year. [ARTICLE]

The Beginning of the Year.

It was a curious circumstance, with which our readers may not all be-famil-iar, that originally determined that the beginning of the year should be the Ist of Januarylt seems odd to begin the year m mid-winter, especially as there is nothing in the heavens or on the earth to mark that as a natural point to reckon from. The solstices and equinoxes, as open to observation and as periodically recurring, were noticed and marked with more or less accuracy even in the earliest times; and, accordingly, most of*the Oriental nations began their year at the autumnal equinox, as the Jews also did as to their civil year, though their ecclesiastical year they dated from the vernal equinox; the Mexicans too began their year at the vernal equinox. All the ancient northern nations of Europe and, the Peruvians of South America commenced the year with the winter solstice, and so did the early Greeks and Romans; the Greeks, however, subsequently changed

to the summer solstice, and the Romans, under a military exigency to be mentioned in a moment, adopted, in the year 153 B. C., an ordinance which thereafter marked for them, and still marks for us, an artificial time for New Year’s, In that year there was a serious revolt against the dominion of Rome within the so-callpd Spanish provinces. Th 3 Lusitanians, ancestors of the present Portuguese, and the Vettones, a tribe of Central Spain,'making common cause together, defeated two Roman Governors, marched at will over the peninsula and pillaged even in the neighborhood of (the Roman capital in Spain, now Cartagena. The Romans at home took these events so seriously as to resolve on sending a consul to Spain, a step that had not before been deemed necessary for more than forty years; and, in order to hasten the departure of the military, they even decreed that the consuls for the year should enter office two months and a half before the legal time. The consuls were always elected in the fall, at the close of the military year, but the day for entering upon office had long been the 15th of March, near the vernal equinox, the time when military campaigns were wont to begin; but at this time and for this reason the day for entering upon office was shifted from the 15th of March to the Ist of January, and thus was accidentally established, as it were, the beginning of the year which we still make use of "at the present day. Julius Cfesar long afterward reformed the calendar in very essential respects, but he did not disturb the beginning of the year, which remained for the Romans, and consequently for all nations and all ages, where the exigencies of a Spanish revolt had once placed it a century and a half before Christ.— N. Y. Evening Post.