Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/317

 of which has proved a will-o’the-wisp. I guess they’ll suppress the week altogether and the month too, unless the lunar month can be turned to account, which is doubtful.’

‘Yes, weeks are a baseless invention, having nothing in nature that represents them,’ observed Mr Bristley, who was standing near. ‘The era of (Novax Ordinis) which is to supplant the  will have to be strictly scientific. No respect will be paid to tradition, least of all theological tradition. Months, weeks, days, and hours will all have to pass into the crucible of science, and no slip-slop makeshifts will be allowed. The world will have to get over its childish habit of reckoning the year by the degrees of light and darkness, heat and cold; those methods may be good for poetry, but they will not do for business. If sidereal time be exact and invariable, while solar time is inexact and variable, every prejudice of habit will have to be discarded, and we must accustom ourselves to having New Year’s Day fall sometimes in the height of summer sometimes in the depth of winter, just as we have accustomed ourselves to have, say four o'clock fall at one season in light and heat, at another season in darkness and cold. Provided that the division of time—as by the sidereal year and the sidereal day—be the same and invariable for all parts of the globe and for all time—mankind will have to clear their local predilections out of the way, to make room for that mode of reckoning.

‘Guess that’ll be something like common sense,’ remarked Letitia.

‘Yes,’ rejoined Mr Bristley; ‘for it is a patent fact that the existing modes of reckoning the year and its divisions, whether in Christian or other countries, however much those modes may have been worked into a plausible system by the ingenuity of obsequious men of letters—they do, in the last resort, rest upon the self-willed