The year comes round with such perfect uniformity that we find it hard to realize how there could ever have been any great difficulty in settling either its true boundaries or its internal divisions. Any body, it seems to us, could make an almanac, as far as the calendar is concerned. Such might be the first thought, even of persons who could not justly be charged with a lack of general intelligence. But let them think again, and they will rather find cause to wonder at the immense amount of observation involved in the process of gathering, age after age, the elements of a computation apparently so simple. Had the seasons been so strikingly marked that the transition from one to the other had been instantaneous, or had the lesser sections of time been so contrived, in the Divine wisdom, as to be exact divisors of the greater, there would have been no difficulty whatever in the problem. But the Author of nature has not made it so easy for us. Twelve moons fall short of the year; thirteen exceed it. Any monthly division, therefore, founded on the revolutions of the satellite, must require, after the lapse of a few years, an addition, or a subtraction, of a certain period, to make the seasons come round again in harmony. The first men, unquestionably, soon learned to note the general revolution by the return of the same seasons. The earliest agricultural operations would necessitate similar estimates, and thus a general notion of the year would be arrived at without an exact knowledge of the precise number of days contained. Hence, in all languages, some such idea has entered into the name. The year is that which comes, and _comes again_. In Greek (if our readers will pardon a little display of learning which we have picked up for the occasion) it is [Greek: eti "ETOS" heteros] _another_ and YET _another_. In the Hebrew it is _repetition_. In our own, and the northern tongues generally, the word in all its forms (_year_, _gear_, _jahr_, _jaar_, &c.) ever denotes a _course_ (_currus_) or _circle_.