Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1862 edition. Excerpt:... astrologiques, ce besoin primitif et uniinstants ou ils se trouvent dans ce plan. Vingt-versel de l'esprit humain." Journal des Savants, huit etoiles, reparties sur le contour du ciel, et 1861, (p. 9.) toujours les memes, leur servent comme autant de Though I had hoped that some one better qualified than myself would vindicate the Indian origin of the ancient Indian astronomy, and though I consider Professor Whitney, who, to an extensive acquaintance with astronomy adds a scholar-like knowledge of Sanskrit, an antagonist even more formidable than Biot, yet, as I protested against the conclusions of the one, I feel bound to oppose the arguments of the other. I do not see that we gain any thing by assuming an indirect instead of a direct importation of Chinese wisdom into India, particularly if the intermediate stage seems to have no other object than to bring the scientific discoveries of the Chinese down to the level of the Indian understanding. Nor do I see that we fare better if, as Professor Weber proposes, we admit a spreading of astronomical knowledge from a Semitic centre, and assume the fundamental notions of chrononomy to have been imported from Babylon to China on one side, and to India on the other. I differ toto ccelo from every one of these theories. I feel as strongly to-day as I did when, in the year 1846,1 read at Paris the articles then published by Biot, that the Brahmans cannot have borrowed the idea of the Nakshatras from the Chinese. I maintain, 1. that the Nakshatras were suggested to the Hindus by the moon's sidereal revolution; 2. that they were intended to mark certain equal divisions of the heavens; and 3. that their number was originally twenty-seven, not twenty-eight. Die Vedischen...