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LETTER VII.

You will think me very presumptuous when I tell you I am going to mention the Indian astronomy in this Letter: but I measure my endeavours to give you the little information I have myself, by the curiosity I know you to possess, rather than by my abilities.

Of all the sciences cultivated by man, astronomy is that which seems to raise him highest in the scale of beings. Sublime as the heavens in which it is conversant, it seems to detach him from earth, and to place him in the midst of beauty, order, and harmony. The magnificent vault of heaven, studded with its brilliant gems, revolving in ceaseless and silent course, must naturally have attracted the earliest regards of man; and to trace the progress of astronomy from its first rude observations, would be to follow the history of human progress from the beginning of the world.

It was natural that the remains of a profound knowledge of the laws of the heavenly bodies, with exact and perspicuous rules for calculating their phænomena, when first discovered in India,

should have attracted no common share of attention from the European philosophers. But on examination, the state of astronomy in modern India exhibits the same melancholy traces of decline and ruin which are discernible in every other science which once flourished in that venerable country.

The antiquity which may be assigned to the Indian astronomy has been disputed; but the general conclusion, drawn from the most respectable authorities, gives its earliest recorded observations in from three to four thousand years before the Christian æra. The arguments of those who contend that the Indians received their astronomy from the Greeks or Arabs, are refuted by the fact, that though the astronomers of Greece had every advantage over those of Hindostan, excepting what they derived from the antiquity of their science, they fell into errors which the Hindûs entirely avoided; to which may be added, that the calculus of the Hindûs, more correct than that of Greece, agrees in its delineation of the heavens at a remote period with the improved state of astronomy in modern Europe. Of the many proofs, however, of the originality of the science in Hindostan, the most remarkable is the rectifi cation of the circle, the rule for computing the

length of its circumference, being used in India before it was known in Europe*.

The existence of the Indian astronomy was not known in Europe till M. de la Loubere, ambassador of Louis XIV. at the court of Siam, brought with him to France some tables and rules for calculating the places of the sun and moon, which were examined by Cassini, who bore testimony to their accuracy. Other tables were sent to Paris by the French missionaries; and M. le Gentil, on his return from India, where he had been to observe the transit of Venus, A. D. 1769, brought with him another set of tables, and the Indian methods of calculating; and in 1787, M. Bailly published his Astronomie Indienne, while in 1789 Mr. Playfair's paper on the same subject appeared in the Edinburgh Transactions. Such was the state of knowledge on this highly interesting subject when the Asiatic Society was established. Since that time, the volumes of their Researches have been enriched with a variety of papers on the Indian astronomy, from which I take the facts I write to you, in hopes that though I understand nothing whatever of the science myself, you may be induced, in the East, to go

*See Mr. Davis's paper, in the second volume of the Asiatic Researches.

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on with studies in which I know you have already made some progress.

The Hindû books on astronomy have the general name of the Jyotish Sastras, in which are to be discovered traits of a bright light, which must have illumined mankind at so very early a period, that M. Bailly seems to doubt whether we should not regard them as remains of antediluvian science, fragments of a system that is lost, and whose ruins only serve to excite our admiration.

The Surya Sidd'hanta* seems to be the Jyotish Sastra of highest authority, if it be not the oldest. It is said to have been revealed by Surya, or the sun, to the sage Meya, according to some about the year of the world 1956. The obliquity of the ecliptic is stated in it to be 24°, which, if founded on actual observation at the time of compiling that Sastra, would confirm its supposed antiquity.

The Hindû division of the zodiac into signs

* Abul Fazzle, in the Ayeen Akberi, enumerates nine sidd❜hantas or treatises on astronomy: 1st, the Brahma Sidd❜hanta; 2d, Surya Sidd'hanta; 3d, Soma Sidd'hanta; 4th, Vrihaspati Sidd'hanta; 5th, Goorg Sidd'hanta; 6th, Nareda Sidd'hanta; 7th, Parasara Sidd'hanta; 8th, Poolustya Sidd'hanta; 9th, Vashishtha Sidd'hanta. But there are many other treatises on the subject, either original works or commentaries on the ancient books.

Their year is

and degrees, is the same as ours. sidereal, and commences at the instant of the sun's entering the sign Aries, each astronomical month containing as many days and fractions of days as he stays in each sign. The civil time differs from the astronomical year, in rejecting the fractional parts, and the civil year and month are begun at sunrise instead of midnight.

The epocha from which the Hindûs compute the motions of the planets, is that point of time counted back, when, according to their motions, they must have been in conjunction at the first point of Aries, or above a thousand millions of years ago, it will take nearly double that period before they are again in the same situation; and the enormous interval between these conjunctions is called a calpa, and mythologically a day of Brahma. The calpa is divided into manuantaras, and great and little yugs, the use of some of which divisions is not now apparent; but the greater yug is an anomalistic period of the sun and moon, at the end of which they are found together in the first of Aries. The division of the great yug into the Satya, Treta, Dwapar, and Cali yugs, are by some supposed to have originated in the precession of the equinoxes (Cranti), but by others they are considered as purely mythological, like the golden,

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