Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.11

c6.11

While reviewing Cuvier’s *The Theory of the Earth*⁵, (in which Cuvier had ridiculed and dismissed the ancient date of the Indian tables), the *Edinburgh Review* took cognisance of the changed attitudes and relationships between Europe and the non-European world, and observed: ‘But though the tide of opinion seems, for some time past, to have set strongly against the high antiquity of the sciences of the East, it does not appear that the main arguments of the Historian of astronomy [i.e., Bailly] have ever been refuted.’ It tried to resolve the contradiction between the Mosaic and Christian belief, and the earlier date of the Indian tables, by advancing the proposition, that ‘the early date of that Astronomy, and the usual date of the Deluge, may be perfectly reconciled, on the supposition that the former is a fragment of antediluvian science, which had escaped the general destruction.’ Such a solution of the controversy was, however, no longer practicable, nor necessary from the viewpoint of European scholarship, in what had by then become an exclusively European century.