Letters of Sir Wirtram Jones to Samvert Davis, Esq. 13 
not oppressed with business. LY Jones presents you with her best compl* 
and I am with great esteem, dear Sir, 
Your ever faithful 
W. JONES. 
XV. 
Gardens near Calcutta, 
4 April 1790 
My dear Sir, 
Allow me to intrude on your present important engagements with a 
second letter on the Extract from the Vardhasanhitd, with which you lately 
favoured me: the passage is of the utmost consequence to me, as it will 
fix the age of the Hindu laws. Iam very sorry that your copy of the book 
is so incorrect: I can assure you, that not a line in it was free from error. 
By knowing the metre, however, I have restored the whole to the entire sa- 
tisfaction of the Pandit who attends me; and I annex a copy of the six 
stanzas, on which the rest of the paper is acomment. The stanzas seem 
introduced as a quotation, but the author of them being called A’chdrya, 
I suppose the whole Vardhasanhitd is written in the metre, called A’ryd: 
I have a fine tract on Music in the same measure. The stanza consists of 
four cesural pauses, of which the first and third contain 12 syllabic mo- 
ments (mdtrds), the second 18, and the fourth 15; so that the couplet 
resembles the long and short verses of the Greeks and: Romans. Pray 
ask Rddhdcheren, whether the whole Sanhitd is in verse, or whether the 
six stanzas in question are quoted from a book entitled Panchasiddhdnticd. 
The comment on them has three quotations; one in verse, from Garga ; 
and two in prose from Pardsara, both very curious. Now the question, 
which you alone can answer, is, how many years have elapsed between the 
time, when the equinoctial colure cut the Hindu ecliptic in the tenth of 
Bharani, and the first of January 1790. I shall be infinitely obliged to 
you if you will answer it, and without attending to the observation ascribed 
to Chiron, which a passage in Pindar makes me think of very doubtful au- 
thority. If the first degree of Mésha were coincident with the first degree 
of Aries in the European sphere, the question would be easy ; because we 
know, by demonstration and observation, that the equinox goes back about 
50’ 0” 12” in a year, and 50’ will answer our purpose, as Pardsara’s 
