170 
those reckoned by cycles, and in which the years ai - e 
distinguished by names, a system which spread from 
India into Tibet, and was long before used in China and 
Japan ; and, fourthly, those derived essentially from the 
Muhammedan era, 1 ' Prinsep. I.e. p. 17; from Col. Warren's 
Kala Sankalita, which, he says, " should be in the 
hands of every one desirous of obtaining a thorough 
knowledge of the subject." 
The Hindoo solar year, as it is improperly called, is 
strictly sidereal. The solar zodiac was formed from the 
lunar one, about the year 1180 B.C., according to Bentley; 
the names of the months being taken from those of the 
lunar mansions, in which the moon happened to be full, in 
the year of its invention. The adoption of the fixed 
sidereal zodiac of twelve signs is ascribed by the same 
author to about A.D. 538, to which time the use of the 
solar zodiac lasted. This subject it is impossible to enter 
into : it may suffice to remark, that " the effect, on civil 
reckoning, is to produce differences in the relative lengths 
of the months, of one or even two days more, or one day 
less, and to bring about a bissextile year of 366 days, as 
nearly as possible once in four years. 11 (Prinsep.) 
" The circumstances of the Indian luni-solar year differ 
from every other mode of dividing and recording time, that 
has been employed in ancient or modern times. Some simi- 
larity had been observed in the secular omission of a month 
in the Chaldean system, and at a particular period the 
common intercalations concurred with those of the lunar 
cycle of Meton, which led the learned to imagine them 
derived from the same source ; but Col. Warren has proved, 
from a minute analysis of the Hindoo Chandra Mana, 
that it has no further similitude to other systems than its 
dependence on the moon's motions must naturally indicate. 11 
Of years numbered by cycles, that called the era of 
