ways in which the Christian peoples measured the 
     passage of time were based on calculations made before 
     the fall of the Roman Empire. The Julian calendar of A.D. 
     325 was still in use in the age of Rabelais.

The rise of statistics permitted the isolation of economics from 
the general social fabric of the sixteenth century:

          The Europeans were striving after a higher degree of 
     quantitative accuracy in many domains during the span 
     of the eighty years or so that followed. Some of them 
     attached a novel importance to the amassing of 
     statistics, and notable of statistics concerning rates of 
     increase, as guides to economic policy, at the very period 
     when, with Bodin, Malynes, Laffemas, Montchretien and 
     Mun, economics first emerged as a separate subject of