Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.72

c9.72

43. Thus have we enumerated no less than nine astronomical elements,⁶⁵ to which the tables of India assign such values as do, by no means, belong to them in these later ages, but such as the theory of gravity proves to have belonged to them three thousand years before the Christian era. At that time, therefore, or in the ages preceding it, the observations must have been made from which these elements were deduced. For it is abundantly evident, that the Brahmins of later times, however willing they might be to adapt their tables to so remarkable an epoch as the Calyougham, could never think of doing so, by substituting, instead of quantities which they had observed, others which they had no reason to believe had ever existed. The elements in question are precisely what these astronomers must have supposed invariable, and of which, had they supposed them to change, they had no rules to go by for ascertaining the variations; since, to the discovery of these rules is required, not only all the perfection to which astronomy is, at this day, brought in Europe, but all that which the sciences of motion and of extension have likewise attained. It is no less clear, that these coincidences are not the work of accident; for it will scarcely be supposed that chance has adjusted the errors of the Indian astronomy with such singular felicity, that observers, who could not discover the true state of the heavens, at the age in which they lived, have succeeded in describing one which took place several thousand years before they were born.