If a good many Americans today do not know that the morning star and the evening star are the same heavenly creature and that her name is Venus, the reason may be that our calendar is based upon the career of a larger and more obvious body called the sun. An ancient Maya of Central America and southern Mexico had not this excuse for ignorance concerning the loveliest of the stars, because the calendar devised by his ingenious priests was a Venus calendar; any knowing citizen of that remarkable civilization was aware that five Venus years were practically equivalent to eight sun years, that eight days elapsed between the last appearance of Hesperus in the west and the first appearance of Phosphorus in the east and that the morning of this first appearance in the east was a morning to be feared, since the light of Venus possessed the power to slay. If the last item implies the existence of what we should call superstition among the Mayas, their calendar, as recently explained and harmonized by Herbert J. Spinden of Harvard, is full proof of their sophistication in at least one realm of science. Dr. Spinden's researches, first announced by the Peabody Museum two years ago and new completed, seem to us quite as romantic as any ever undertaken by an archaeologist. --The Nation.