EARLY HINDOO MATHEMATICS. 335 



and contemplate his own perfections," or to the Egyptian who evolved 

 pyramids, and obelisks, and avenues of spbinxes, out of bis infinite 

 leisure. 



Tbere are always " the complaining ones," for whom the times are 

 stale, who would lament with Sir Thomas Browne that " mummy is 

 become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for 

 balsams ; " but they forget that the great nineteenth century buys its 

 mummies in order to have a good look at them, and that it studies the 

 Rosetta Stone out of pure interest, and to make no money. 



But the real interest of former ages is the study of their manner 

 of thought. We study what they thought to determine how they 

 thought it. We have an immense and vague curiosity to connect our 

 minds with the minds of long ages ago. Half the fascination of Dar- 

 win, Tylor, Lubbock, and Wilson, is from this cause. 



It piques us to know that, sixteen hundred years before our era, 

 there was a poet who sang : 



" Like as a plank of drift-wood 

 Tossed on the watery main, 

 Another plank encounters, 

 Meets touches parts again ; 

 So, tossed, and drifting, ever 

 On life's unresting sea, 

 Men meet, and greet, and sever, 

 Parting eternally." ' 



This surely is not the verse of a primitive people ; these are not 

 the feeble lispings of the infants of our race ; did it not require time 

 to accustom the Hindoo mind to similes as complex as these ? This 

 verse would not seem childish if Tennyson had written it ; it appeals 

 to as deep a consciousness as Coleridge's "Hymn in the Vale of 

 Chamounix," and would even bear comparison with the " Peter Bell " 

 of the great Lake poet. 



If this people was so old thirty-four hundred years ago, when was 

 it young ? We begin to believe, with Bailly, 2 in the existence of " ce 

 peuple ancien qui nous a tout appris, except^ son nom et son exist- 

 ence." 



It may, then, be interesting for us to glance at the state of science 

 among these predecessors of ours. But let us remember that we are 

 applying a severe test, when we compare their progress with the 

 science of to-day. Let us remember that it is only within a hundred 

 years that the return of comets has been predicted ; that our knowl- 

 edge of the constittition of the sun has been gained since 1859; that 

 Newton has been dead only 147 years, and that Lagrange and La- 



1 "Book of Good Councils: written in Sanscrit, b. c. 1600;" translated by Edwin 

 Arnold, M. A., Oxford, 1861. 



a " This ancient people who have taught us every thing but their own name and their 

 own existence." 



