Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.3

c9.3

2. In the progress which astronomy has thus made, through almost all the nations, from the Indus to the Atlantic, there is scarce a step which cannot be accurately traced; and it is never difficult to determine what each age, or nation received from another, or what it added to the general stock of astronomical knowledge. The various systems, that have prevailed in all these countries, are visibly connected with one another; they are all derived from one original, and would incline us to believe, that the manner in which men begin to observe the heavens, and to reason about them, is an experiment on the human race, which has been made but once.