GENERAL KNOWLEDGE.
I was surprised to see your well-informed paper perpetuating a misstatement. On p. 558 of the number for April 4th your readers are told that Augustus added a day to the month Sextilis-August to make it as long as July. He did no such thing, firstly because he was not such a fool, secondly because the month had thirty-one days already. See any modern work on the Roman calendar, such as that of Ideler, or the ancient writers on the subject, such as Censorinus, de die natali, 20, 1, who tell us in so many words that Julius Caesar lengthened Sextilis to thirty-one days. Who was first guilty of this blunder about the length of August I do not know ; but a friend who is interested in calendars and calendar- reform tells me that he has found it in a rare work of the year 1583, La chiave del Calendaro, by Hugolini Martelli. From that or some other source it has got into several popular works of later date, including a number of editions of the Encyclo- paedia Britannica.—H. J. ROSE, Edgecliff East, The Scores, St. Andrews, Fife.
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