Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book .. .is there any allusion to a prior residence ... out of India ... There is no reason whatever for thinking th… - Mountstuart Elphinstone in India, 1796-1818

Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) in comparing the ancient Greeks with the ancient Hindus, says: "Their (Hindus) general learning was more considerable; and in the knowledge of the being and nature of God, they were already in possession of a light which was but faintly perceived even by the loftiest intellects in the best days of Athens."

Such arguments were by no means uncontested. In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone objected that "it is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book . . . is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India." Responding to some of the arguments that had been brought forward, he argued that "to say that [the original language] spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption, and even contrary to language; for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle." As far as he was concerned, "the question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one, and as little for denying that they may have done so before the earliest trace of their records or tradition" (97-98).

There is no question of the superiority of the Hindus over their rivals in the perfection to which they brought the science. Not only is Aryabhatta superior to Diaphantus (as is shown by his knowledge of the resolution of equations involvll1g several unknown quantities, and in general method ofresolvll1g all indetermll1ate problems of at least the first degree), but he and his successors press hard upon the discoveries of algebraists who lived almost in our own time!