Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c10.12

c10.12

As it is probable that many of the observations made by Indian astronomers are recorded in manuscript which a more general intercourse with the natives may discover, it becomes the more necessary on that account to make a particular examination of the instruments at Benares, even to enable us to use such observations, if they should chance to be found hereafter; this will appear indispensably requisite, when we consider that the Chinese have their measures of a degree different from ours and that 23, 39', 18", of our divisions make just 24 in China. Now it would have been impossible for us to have made use of these observations had not a comparison between the Chinese instruments and ours enabled Father Gaubil to give us the ratio between them; and as the observatory at Benares is probably the only one existing in India, so no opportunity of examination ought to be neglected, lest the instruments should be defaced by accident or barbarism, and observation be thus rendered useless that might perhaps have been accumulating for ages; at least this advantage will arise from it, that we shall know what mode of angular sub-divisions they really did follow, and from thence probably be enabled to determine whether the astronomers of India had any communication with the Chinese or Arabian & c.