PHYSICAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES. 13

discoveries of other people. He also shows that theyhad no solar year, but merely employed a period oftwelve lunar months of twenty-nine and thirty daysalternately, with a triennial intercolation of a thirteenthmonth to make it correspond more nearly with the sun’scourse.

In other branches of science, the national vanity ofthe Chinese has led them to claim an equally earlyacquaintance with some of the most important facts.They have pretended to a knowledge of the mariner’scompass, at a period beyond 1200 b. c., and have alsolaid claim to originating many of the fundamentaltheorems of geometry and even of trigonometry. Fromwhat has been discovered of their extreme want ofhonesty, and fondness for appropriating to themselvesthe inventions of others, but little credit is now gene-rally attached to these claims.

The Indians.

Astronomical tables pretending to an enormous an-tiquity have been brought from India . The first wereimported from Siam by M. de la Loubere in 1687; towhich several other collections have since been added,particularly those from Tirvalore, Chrisnabouram, &c.These tables have afforded matter of great discussion.They refer to an epoch b. c. 3102; and their claim tothis, as a real date, has been supported by M. Bailly *with great learning and ingenuity, whilst it has beenheld to be entirely fictitious by MM. Laplacet, Bentley,and Davis. ^ An ancient treatise on astronomy, calledthe Surya-Siddhanta, has been also the subject of closescrutiny; and it seems now admitted by those bestqualified to judge, that it was customary with the Hin-doos to take for an epoch a fictitious general conjunction,obtained by calculating backwards, with the respectivemean motions attributed to the several planets. Laplacehas assigned very probable reasons for believing that the

* Astronomie Indienne.X Asiatic Researches, ii.

+ Syst. du Monde, lib. v.