Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.213

c9.213

73. In the language, however, of their rules, we may trace some marks of a fabulous and ignorant age, from which indeed even the astronomy of Europe is not altogether free. The place of the moon's ascending node, is with them the *place of the Dragon* or the *Serpent*; the moon's distance from the node, is literally translated by M. Le Gentil, *la lune offensée du dragon*. Whether it be that we have borrowed these absurdities from India, along with astrology, or if the popular theory of eclipses has, at first, been every where the same, the moon's node is also known with us by the name of the *cauda draconis*. In general, however, the signification of the terms in these rules, so far as we know it, is more rational. In one of them we may remark considerable refinement; *ayanangsam*, which is the name for the reduction made on the sun's longitude, on account of the precession of the equinoxes, is compounded from *ayanam*, a *course*, and *angsam*, an *atom*. *Mem. Acad. Scien.* II. p.251. The equinox is almost the only point not distinguished by a visible object, of which the *course* or motion is computed in this astronomy.