More than one Roman calendar is in existence, preserved by the durability of the material, which is a square block of marble. Each side contains three months, in parallel columns, headed by the appropriate signs of the zodiac. In these the astronomical information was given, with directions for the agricultural business of the month, and notices of the respective gods under whose tutelage the months were placed, and of the religious festivals in their course, with a warning to the husbandmen against neglecting those religious duties, upon the due performance of which the success of their labours depended. Those learned authors who look in the Scriptures for what is not to be found there, and supply by conjectures whatever they wish to find, have not decided whether astronomy was part of Adam's infused knowledge, or whether it was acquired by him, and his son Seth; but from Seth they say it descended to Abraham, and he imparted it to the Egyptians. Whatever may be thought of this derivation, the Egyptian mind seems always to have pullulated with superstition, as the slime of their own Nile is said to have fermented into low and loathsome forms of miscreated life. The Rabbis say that ten measures of witchcraft were sent into the world, and Egypt got nine of them. The Greeks are said to have learnt from the Babylonians the twelve divisions of the day. The arrow-headed inscriptions at Babylon are supposed by some of those who have bestowed most attention upon them to be calendars: and there can be little doubt that where the divisions of time were first scientifically observed, there the first calendar would be formed. In Egypt however it is that we hear of them first; and such resemblances exist between the Egyptian calendar, and the oldest of those which have been discovered in the north of Europe, that Court de Gebelin supposes they must have had a common origin, and in an age anterior to those Chaldeans whose astronomical observations ascended nineteen hundred years before the age of Alexander. This is too wild an assumption to be soberly maintained. What is common to both found its way to Scandinavia in far later times. Christianity was imported into those countries with all the corruptions which it had gathered in the East as well as in the West; and the Christian calendar brought with it as many superstitions of European growth, as there was room for inserting. There was room for many even upon the Norwegian staff.