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Show Will Not be a Leap Year. "Will the year 1000 be a leap year ? If not, why not?" When Julius Caesar revised the calendar he appointed an extra day every four years, and his Calendar lasted until A. D. 1582. Now the ordinary year is eleven minutes and eleven seconds short of being 3654 days in length, so that there isn't really a full-sized extra day to be added to February every four years. Csesar didn't know this, or didn't care about it, and for 1600 years we kept borrowing from the future, until in 1582 we'd borrowed ten days. Pope Gregory XIII started to correct this. He ordered October 5 to be called October 15, and, to square things, ordered that centurial years should no, as a rule, be leap years. But if leap year is omitted regularly each hundredth year, we pay back nearly a day too much; so Pope Gregory further ordered that every centennial year which could be divided by four should be a leap year after all. So we borrow eleven minutes each year from the future, more than pay our borrowings back by omitting three leap years in three centuries, and finally square matters by having a leap year in the fourth centennial year. This .rangement is so exact that we borrow more than we pay back to the extent of only one day in 3800 years. Sixteen hundred was a leap year, 2000 wfll be, but 1900 will not be. |