Colebrooke also expressed the familiar argument of the eighteenth century in behalf of a liberal spirit between cultures. The West, he stated, “owes … - Henry Thomas Colebrooke

H. T. Colebrooke (1803) also used this method to calculate the degree of difference between the constellation in which Spring, and hence the vernal equinox, began in the Veda and the constellation in which it began in his own time. He concluded that the Vedas "were not arranged in their present form earlier than the fourteenth century before the Christian era" (284).

Connected as those highly polished and refined languages [Sanskrit and Arabic] are with other tongues, they deserve to be studied for the sake of the particular dialects and idioms to which they bear relation; for their own sake, that is, for the literature which appertains to them; and for the analysis of language in general, which has been unsuccessfully attempted on too narrow ground, but may be prosecuted, with effect, upon wider induction.

It appears that Aryabhatta affirmed the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis, and that he accounted for it by a wind or current of aerial fluid, the extent of which, according to the orbit assigned to it by him, corresponds to an elevation of little more than a hundred miles from the surface of the earth : that he possessed the true theory of the causes of lunar and solar eclipses, and disregarded the imaginary dark planets of the mycologists and astrologers, affirming the moon and primary planets (and even the stars) to be essentially dark, and only illumined by the sun: that he noticed the motion of the solstitial and equinoctial points, but restricted it to a regular oscillation, of which he assigned the limit and the period : that he ascribed to the epicycles, by which the motion of a planet is represented, a form varying from the circle and nearly elliptic : that he recognized a motion of the nodes and apsides of all the primary planets, as well as of the moon j though in this instance, as in some others, his censurer imputes to him variance of doctrine.