The introduction of the Julian calendar at that time is however nothing better than an antiquary's mere dream. At a later period the Germans, who had much more communication with the Romans than ever the Scandinavians had, divided the year into three seasons, if Tacitus was rightly informed; this being one consequence of the little regard which they paid to agriculture. _Hyems et ver et æstas intellectum ac vocabula habent; autumni perinde nomen ac bona ignorantur._ Moreover Wormius was assured, (and this was a fact which might well have been handed down by memory, and was not likely to have been recorded), that the wooden almanacks were originally copied from a written one in a very antient manuscript preserved in the church at Drontheim. There is no proof that a pagan _Rimstoke_ ever existed in those countries. The clergy had no interest in withholding this kind of knowledge from the people even in the darkest ages of papal tyranny and monkish imposture. But during the earlier idolatries of the Romans it seems to have been withheld; and it was against the will of the Senate that the Fasti were first divulged to the people by Cneius Flavius Scriba. The carelessness of the Romans during many ages as to the divisions of time, seems scarcely compatible even with the low degree of civilization which they had attained. We are told that when the Twelve Tables were formed, no other distinctions of the day than those of sunrise and sunset were known among them by name; that some time after they begun to compute from noon to noon; and that for three hundred years they had nothing whereby to measure an hour, nor knew of any such denomination, _tamdiu populi Romani indiscreta lux fait._ A brazen pillar, which marked the hour of noon by its shortest shadow, was the only means of measuring time, till, in the first Punic war, the Consul M. Valerius Messala brought thither a sun-dial from the spoils of Catana in Sicily. This was in the 477th year of the City; and by that dial the Romans went ninety-nine years without adapting it to the meridian of Rome. A better was then erected; but they were still without any guide in cloudy weather, till in the year 595 after the building of the City, Scipio Nasica introduced the water-clock, which is said to have been invented about eighty years before by Ctesibius of Alexandria. When the Romans had begun to advance in civilization, no people ever made a more rapid progress in all the arts and abuses which follow in its train. Astrology came with astronomy from the East, for science had speedily been converted into a craft, and in the age of the Cæsars the Egyptian professors of that craft were among the pests of Rome.