The course of inquiry into the arts, as into the sciences, of Asia, cannot fail of leading to much which is curious and instructive. The inquiry exte… - Henry Thomas Colebrooke

In progress of such researches, it is not perhaps too much to expect that something may yet be gleaned for the advancement of knowledge and improvement of arts at home [in Britain]. In many recent instances, inventive faculties have been tasked to devise anew, what might have been as readily copied from an Oriental type; or unacknowledged imitation has reproduced in Europe, with an air of novelty, what had been for ages familiar to the East. Nor is that source to be considered as already exhausted. In beauty of fabric, in simplicity of process, there pos sibly yet remains something to be learnt from China, from Japan, from India, which the refinement of Europe need not disdain.

"The ancient language of India, the polished Sanskrit, not unallied to Greek and various other languages of Europe, may yet contribute something to their elucidation, and still more to the not unimportant subject of general grammar."'

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.