No reader of the Bible can avoid remarking its extreme particularity of date. The oldest and, on this account, the most striking instance is in the narration of the flood: "In the 600th year of Noah, in the second month, and on the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." And so also in respect to its close. There is the same particularity, too, in the date of the Passover, of the Exodus, of the arrival at Sinai, of various events in the wilderness, of the wars and settlement of Canaan, of the building and dedication of the temple, and of the messages of the later prophets. The first would seem to present the most unanswerable proof that the Jewish computation had been derived from an antediluvian science that must have been of a higher kind than we are generally disposed to acknowledge. With all their mathematics, and with some attainments in astronomy to which the Jew could make no pretension, the calendar of the Greeks presents the appearance of far more confusion. Herodotus, after saying that the Egyptians first _found out_ the year, and divided it into twelve parts by _means of the stars_, praises their arrangement (which was probably the same with, or derived from, that of the Patriarchical times) as being much more easy and correct than the division of the Greeks. "The Egyptians," he says, "divide the year into twelve months of thirty days each; and then, by adding five days to each year, they have a uniform revolution of time; whereas the Greeks, for the sake of adjusting the seasons accurately, add every third year an intercalary month" (Herod. ii. 4). By this, however, they seem only to have made "confusion worse confounded." The great difficulty of the Greeks arose from the attempt to do what the wiser Egyptians and Hebrews seem to have abandoned--namely, to divide the year solely by lunar months. By arbitrary intercalations, it is true, they could bring the solar and lunar years to a tolerable agreement, but then, their effect was continually to change the places of the months relatively to the seasons. The periods of intercalation were at first every two years, then three, and lastly four, and eight. In the two latter they seem to have been governed by some respect to the quadrennial return of the great Olympic games, and the Olympiads corresponding thereto. The computation of the year was afterward brought to a still greater degree of accuracy by what was called the cycle of Melon, which, by embracing a period of nineteen years brought the times of the new and full moon to fall again, very nearly, on the same days of each month.