The Waterbury Democrat., 1940-02-28

New York, Feb. 20-Old Father Time will declare an extra dividend on February 2o--the quadrennial Leap-Year Day.
 Leap-Xear. Day goes back to an- cient Egypt of the year 23s B. c. It's origin is on record in the 7- foot chiseled surface of the Tanis- or Canupus-Stone, Q cast of which may be sen in the National Museum in Washington. This stone was dis covered at Tanis, Egypt, in 1866. It bears Q long inscription in Egyptian and Greek, a decree establishing Leap Year in Egypt. The decree Of Ptolemy Euergetes, freely translated, reads:
 "In order that 1t may happen that the matters decreed to be done at each season of he year may be done in accordance with the position which the heavens have with refer eEace to the things which have to be performed at the present time (so that occasion may no be given and the case may not arise that some of the winter festivities should be observed in he summer, in conse- quence of the rising of the calendar star Sirius advancing one day every four years); and on the other hand, in order that some of the summer festivals shall not in the future come to be celebrated in the winter "a thing which has actually hap pened in the past and would hap pen again if the year always con- sisted of 36O days and additional days, according to the current prac- tice).
 "It is commanded that from this time onward, one day--a festival of the good-doing gods shall be added every four years, so that every man shall know that the small amount of time which was lacking in the arrangement of the seasons and of the year and in the rules which passed as laws for the knowledge of their movements, has been corrected, and that this cor- rection hs sbeen supplied by the good-doing gods"
 The attempt to insert Leap- Year Day every four years failed, however, because of opposition to change by the Egyptian priests.
 The actual introduction of Leap Year into the calendar came 200 years later when Julius Caesar, combining scientific interest with military conquest seized upon the superior Egyptian method of cal- endar calculation as means for abolishing the many absurdities of the Roman system.
 Various curious explanations of Roman calendar reform appear all too often in the books of supposed authorities, but the real explanation, based on information gathered by The World Calendar Association, was Caesars desire to strengthen his power and at the same time to improve the calendar. Previous to Cassar's reform, the pontiffs, reg ulasors of the old Roman calendar. added or neglected to add days as 1t met with their political or per- soral aspirations. Under Roman traditions these leaders proclaimed days for elections, public holidays and religious festivals. With Caesars reform, this power was taken out of the hands of individuals by creating a stabilized calendar including the Leap- Year rule. The regular 7-day week was not known to the Romans
 When Caesar took this step, es- socially correcting the irregularities of tiie year-length by means of a regular Leap Year, he introduced 10 the Western World the calendar calculation which has been observed ever since. After his assassination, thts Leap Year rule vas misinter- preted ard had to be corrected by his successor, Augustus, and mary years later by Pope Gregory XIII. With Caesars rule, the calendar year was Il minutes longer than the seasonal year observed by the sun. After IS centuries, 1t was observed that the date of the spring equinox was slowly moving back from it's or- iginal place.
 Tn 1882 Pope Gregory XIII isued his Papal Bull, in which Caesars Leap Year rule was changed so that after the year 1900 the Leap Years of three centurial years in every four would be omitted. That Is, in every period of 400 years, three Leap Years would be kept as common ones.
 Now the entire civilized world is reckoning time acording to the Leap Year rule laid down by Gregory in his reform of 1882. The civil year keeps step very well with the as- tronomical seasons but there still remains some error in the calendar, an error which continues to accurn-