Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c10.6

c10.6

But notwithstanding that the ruins and repositories of Greece and Rome have been ransacked and scrutinised for antiquities, these former prejudices are still in force, and the East Indies are almost entirely neglected; for though the country teems with curiosities of almost every kind, yet excepting the late translation of the Code of Gentoo laws, Europe has received less information from her sons in these matters, than if she had dispatched none to the East but Huns and barbarians; and yet there is a reason to believe that the ‘Parent of the Sciences’ (notwithstanding that epithet is usually applied to Egypt): for the Chinese on the one side, and the Babylonians on the other, we know had astronomical observations, and yet Egypt with all her boasted antiquity had none.