The History of Indian Literature c8.48

c8.48

In closing this survey of Vedic literature, I have lastly to call attention to two other branches of science, which, though they do not appear to have attained in this period to the possession of a literature—at least, not one of which direct relics and records have reached us—must yet have enjoyed considerable cultivation—I mean Astronomy and Medicine. Both received their first impulse from the exigencies of religious worship. Astronomical observations—though at first, of course, these were only of the rudest description—were necessarily required for the regulation of the solemn sacrifices; in the first place, of those offered in the morning and evening, then of those at the new and full moon, and finally of those at the commencement of each of the three seasons. Anatomical observations, again, were certain to be brought about by the dissection of the victim at the sacrifice, and the dedication of its different parts to different deities. The Indo-Germanic mind, too, being so peculiarly susceptible to the influences of nature, and nature in India more than anywhere else inviting observation, particular attention could not fail to be early devoted to it. Thus we find in the later portions of the Vájasaneyi-Saṃhitá and in the Chhándogyopanishad express mention made of “observers of the stars” and “the science of astronomy;” and, in particular, the knowledge of the twenty-seven (twenty-eight) lunar mansions was early diffused. They are enumerated singly in the Taittiríya-Saṃhitá, and the order in which they there occur is one that must necessarilyast have been established somewhere between 1472 and 536 b.c. Strabo, in the above-mentioned passage, expressly assigns ἀστρονομία as a favourite occupation of the Βραχμᾶνες. Nevertheless, they had not yet made great progress at this period; their observations were chiefly confined to the course of the moon, to the solstice, to a few fixed stars, and more particularly to astrology.