Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.92

c9.92

56. From the hypothesis which is thus found to be the basis of the Indian astronomy, one of the first conclusions which presents itself, is the existence of a remarkable affinity between the system of the Brahmins and that of Ptolemy. In the latter, the same thing was supposed for the five planets, that appears in the former to have been universally established, viz. that their orbits were circles, having the earth within them, but removed at a small distance from the centre, and that each planet described the circumference of its orbit, not with an uniform velocity, but with one that would appear uniform, if it were viewed from a point as far above the centre of the orbit, as that centre is above the earth. This point was, in the language of Ptolemy’s astronomy, the centre of the equant.