Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c13.5

c13.5

The object of the present publication is to exhibit the science in the state in which the Hindus possessed it, by an exact version of the most approved treatise on it in the ancient language of India, with one of the earlier treatises (the only extant one) from which it was compiled. The design of this preliminary dissertation is to deduce from these and from the evidence which will be here offered, the degree of advancement to which the science had arrived in a remote age. Observations will be added, tending to a comparison of the Indian, with the Arabian, the Grecian, and the modern Algebra: and the subject will be left to the consideration of the learned, for a conclusion to be drawn by them from the internal, no less than the external proof, on the question who can best vindicate a claim to the merit of having originally invented or first improved the methods of computation and analysis, which are the groundwork of both the simple and abstruser parts of Mathematics; that is, Arithmetic and Algebra: so far at least as the ancient inventions are affected; and also in particular points, where recent discoveries are concerned.