This led
to great practical inconveniences; for whenever, for example, any thing
was required by law to be done in certain months, intending to have them
done in the summer, and the specified month came at length to be a
winter month, the law would require the thing to be done in exactly the
wrong season. Caesar remedied all this by adopting a new system of
months, which should give three hundred and sixty-five days to the year
for three years, and three hundred and sixty-six for the fourth; and so
exact was the system which he thus introduced, that it went on unchanged
for sixteen centuries. The months were then found to be eleven days out
of the way, when a new correction was introduced,[4] and it will now go
on three thousand years before the error will amount to a single day.
Caesar employed a Greek astronomer to arrange the system that he
adopted; and it was in part on account of the improvement which he thus
effected that one of the months, as has already been mentioned, was
called July. Its name before was Quintilis.
[Footnote 4: By Pope Gregory XIII. at the time of the change from the
old style to the new]
[Sidenote: Magnificent schemes.]
[Sidenote: Caesar collects the means to carry out his vast schemes.]
Caesar formed a great many other vast and magnificent schemes.
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