^* The sixty-second minute, the sixty-minute hour, and the twenty-four-hour day may now be near-universally accepted, but France has a long tradition of preferring decimal time, which supporters insist is logically connected to the decimal divisions of length and mass. For many centuries China divided its days in decimal fashion, but did so somewhat capriciously—there were extended periods of Chinese history when the basic unit, the ke, differed markedly in its duration from other periods. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits brought harmony to Chinese timekeeping, declared the ke to be a quarter of an hour, and thence gently shepherded China into diurnal conformity with the rest of the world.