Copying from the Bab, Baha has seen fit to regulate the calendar. Following the Zoroastrian custom, Baha ordains that the year begin at the vernal equinox--March 21--because that is the spring-time, the time of the renewal of vegetable life. Good! But in Australia it is the time of death--of the approach of winter. The reason assigned is not universal, and is not adapted to all climes. As has been said above, the months are ordained to be nineteen of nineteen days each, with four or five intercalary days in March. The week is abolished, that primitive division of time which has such a definite place in nature, in the phases of the moon, and is established in the three great monotheistic religions with their weekly Sabbaths. Instead of the latter is substituted the nineteenth day Unity feast. How do such changes aid universality or unification? Coinage, fines, taxes, and tithes are arranged on the number 19. Remey's book has nineteen chapters, as the "Bayan" has. _The Star of the West_, a magazine of the American Bahais, is published every nineteen days, and bears the Bahai calendar on its editorial page. Instances might be indefinitely extended. But later the number nine, the number of Baha, has come more into use. Abbas has set apart the ninth day of the month as well as the nineteenth for certain religious purposes. The Bahai era is sometimes dated from the declaration of the Bab in 1844, and sometimes from the birth of Baha in 1817. Are these innovations more an aid to universality than adherence to the established calendar and era, or than the decimal system or the metric system which the civilized world has been striving to extend? Professor Browne says: "What could be more impractical than the adoption of the number nineteen as the basis of measures or calculations?" It bears the mark of Oriental fancy rather than of divine revelation.