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 improveme… - Henry Thomas Colebrooke

The more we study ancient Indian philosophy, "the more intimate will the relation be found between the philosophy of Greece and that of India. Whichever is the type or the copy, whichever has borrowed or has lent, certain it is that the one will serve to elucidate the other. The philosophy of India may be employed for a commentary on that of Greece; and conversely, Grecian philosophy will help to explain Indian. That of Arabia, too, avowedly copied from the Grecian model, has preserved much which else might have been lost. A part has been restored through the medium of translation, and more yet [may] be retrieved from Arabic stores.""

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).

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 extends over regions, the most anciently and the most numerously peopled on the globe. The range of research is as wide as those regions are vast; and as various as the people who inhabit them are diversified. It embraces their ancient and modern history; their civil polity; their long-enduring institutions; their manners and their customs; their languages and their literature; their sciences, speculative and practical: in short, the progress of knowledge among them; the pitch which it has attained; and last, but most important, the means of its extension.... [I]t is in Asia that recorded and authentic history of mankind commences.