﻿XXVII. 



A SUPPLEMENT TO THE ESSAY. 

 ON INDIAN CHRONOLOGY. 



BY THE PRESIDENT. 



OUR ingenious associate Mr. Samuel Davis (whom 

 1 name with respect and applause, and who will 

 soon, I trust, convince i VI . Badly that it is very possi- 

 ble for an European to translate and explain the Surya 

 SidJhanta) lavoured me lately with a copy, taken by 

 his Pandit, of the original passage, mentioned in his 

 paper on the Astronomical Computations of the Hindus 

 concerning the places of the colures in the time of 

 Varaha, compare.! with their position in the age of a 

 certain Muni, or ancient Indian philosopher; and the 

 passage appears to afford evidence of two actual ob- 

 servations, which will ascertain the chronology of the 

 Hindus, if not by rigorous demonstration, at least by 

 a near approach to it. 



The copy of the Varaliisanhita, from which the 

 three pages received by me had been transcribed, is 

 unhappily so incorrect (if the transcript itself was not 

 hastily made) that every, line of it must be disfi- 

 gured by some gross error ; and my Pandit, who 

 examined the passage carefully at his own house, gave 

 it up as inexplicable ; so that, if I had not studied 

 the system of Sanscrit prosody, I should have laid 

 it aside in despair : but though it was written as prose, 

 without any sort of distinction or punctuation, yet, 

 when I read it aloud, my ear caught, in some sentences, 

 the cadence of verse, and of a particular metre, called 

 Arya, which is regulated (not by the number of syllables, 

 like other Indian measures, but) by the proportion of 



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