10 How the Church Has Changed the World The other movement is attributable to the tilt of the earth, of about twenty-three degrees. The tilt makes it so that the sun’s path changes from day to day as the rotating earth moves in its yearly course. In England and North America, the sun rises higher and higher in its meridian as the days grow longer, until at one point it seems to “stop”—hence we have the word solstice, sun-stop. Then its noon is lower and lower in the sky, until at another point it stops again. We can measure our years according to the regular patterns of that path. The problem is that the year is a little longer than 365 days. Julius Caesar tried to account for that by putting in “leap year” days for every fourth year, but that turned out to be a little too many. People began to notice it. Dante, in the Middle Ages, was well aware that the calendar had been lagging. Eventually, Beatrice says, the “neglected hundredths of your years” would cause spring to begin in January! Not to worry, old ladies tending your flower gardens: that did not mean that snow would kill your daffodils, no more than Daylight Savings Time would fade your curtains. Days would be days and years would be years, but your computation would be off.
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