Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.20

c9.20

12. In these tables, the motions of the moon are deduced, by certain intercalations, from a period of nineteen years, in which she makes nearly 235 revolutions; and it is curious to find at Siam, the knowledge of that cycle, of which the invention was thought to do so much honour to the Athenian astronomer Meton, and which makes so great a figure in our modern kalendars.¹⁵ The moon's apogee is supposed to have been in the beginning of the moveable Zodiac, 621 days after the epoch of the 21st of March 638, and to make an entire revolution in the heavens in the space of 3232 days.¹⁶ The first of these suppositions agrees with Mayer's tables to less than a degree, and the second differs from them only by 11ʰ, 14′, 31″; and if it be considered that the apogee is an ideal point in the heavens, which even the eyes of an astronomer cannot directly perceive, to have discovered its true motion, so nearly, argues no small correctness of observation.