With the same view the improvers of the Roman calendar intended--while otherwise retaining the current calendar--in the two inter-calary years of the four years' cycle to shorten not the intercalary months, but the two Februaries by 7 days each, and consequently to fix that month in the intercalary years at 22 and 21 days respectively instead of 29 and 28.

But want of mathematical precision and theological scruples, especially in reference to the annual festival of Terminus which fell within those very days in February, disarranged the intended reform, so that the Februaries of the intercalary years came to be of 24 and 23 days, and thus the new Roman solar year in reality ran to 366 1/4 days.

Some remedy for the practical evils resulting from this was found in the practice by which, setting aside the reckoning by the months or ten months of the calendar (30) as now no longer applicable from the inequality in the length of the months, wherever more accurate specifications were required, they accustomed themselves to reckon by terms of ten months of a solar year of 365 days or by the so-called ten-month year of 304 days.

Over and above this, there came early into use in Italy, especially for agricultural purposes, the farmers' calendar based on the Egyptian solar year of 365 1/4 days by Eudoxus (who flourished 386).
Structural and Plastic Art A higher idea of what the Italians were able to do in these departments is furnished by their works of structural and plastic art, which are closely associated with the mechanical sciences.

Here too we do not find phenomena of real originality; but if the impress of borrowing, which the plastic art of Italy bears throughout, diminishes its artistic interest, there gathers around it a historical interest all the more lively, because on the one hand it preserves the most remarkable evidences of an international intercourse of which other traces have disappeared, and on the other hand, amidst the well-nigh total loss of the history of the non-Roman Italians, art is almost the sole surviving index of the living activity which the different peoples of the peninsula displayed.