The _Metonic Cycle_ has sometimes been confounded with the Saros, but it is not the same with it, nor was the period used, like the Saros, for foretelling eclipses, but for ascertaining the _age_ of the moon at any given period. It consisted of nineteen tropical years, during which time there are exactly two hundred and thirty-five new moons; so that, at the end of this period, the new moons will recur at seasons of the year corresponding exactly to those of the preceding cycle. If, for example, a new moon fell at the time of the vernal equinox, in one cycle, nineteen years afterwards it would occur again at the same equinox; or, if it had happened ten days after the equinox, in one cycle, it would also happen ten days after the equinox, nineteen years afterwards. By registering, therefore, the exact days of any cycle at which the new or full moons occurred, such a calendar would show on what days these events would occur in any other cycle; and, since the regulation of games, feasts, and fasts, has been made very extensively, both in ancient and modern times, according to new or full moons, such a calendar becomes very convenient for finding the day on which the new or full moon required takes place. Suppose, for example, it were decreed that a festival should be held on the day of the first full moon after the Vernal equinox. Then, to find on what day that would happen, in any given year, we have only to see what year it is of the lunar cycle; for the day will be the same as it was in the corresponding year of the calendar which records all the full moons of the cycle for each year, and the respective days on which they happen. The Athenians adopted the metonic cycle four hundred and thirty-three years before the Christian era, for the regulation of their calendars, and had it inscribed in letters of gold on the walls of the temple of Minerva. Hence the term _golden number_, still found in our almanacs, which denotes the year of the lunar cycle. Thus, fourteen was the golden number for 1837, being the fourteenth year of the lunar cycle.