Leap Year

Leap Year. The true solar year is 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes 50 seconds long, so if one year begins at 12 o'clock midnight, the next should rightly start about 6 a.m., and the following one at 12 noon. This would cause great inconvenience, and to avoid it an extra day is introduced into the month of February every fourth year, which is called leap year. Usually February has 28 days, but in leap year it has 29. The year whose number is exactly divisible by four is leap year. The correction of orie day in four years is rather too big, and to compensate for it the extra day is omitted three times in every four centuries. That century the number of, whose year is exactly divi-, sible by 400 is a leap year, the others are not.