“I engage to support an opinion (which the learned and industrious M. Montucla seems to treat with extreme contempt) that the _Indian_ division of the Zodiack was not borrowed from the _Greeks_ or _Arabs_, but, having been known in this country (India) for time immemorial, and being the same in part with that used by other nations of the old _Hindu_ race, was probably invented by the first progenitors of that race before their dispersion.”[43] [43] _On the Antiquity of the Indian Zodiack. Complete Works_, vol. i. p. 333. Since Sir William Jones wrote this challenge, and supported it with whatever linguistic and scientific resources were at his command, volumes of heated controversy by many authors have been devoted to the same subject. Just at present, however, an almost indifferent calmness has taken the place of the excited interest formerly manifested. The majority of scholars, both European and Indian, appear to have accepted, as an axiom, the opinion that much of Indian astronomy, and certainly the Indian acquaintance with the twelve-fold division of the Zodiac, is to be attributed to Grecian influence. A minority of writers still hold the view advocated by Sir William Jones about a hundred years ago, and thus reiterated by Burgess (the translator of the Indian standard astronomical work the _Sûrya-Siddhânta_) in 1860. “The use of this (twelve-fold) division, and the present names of the signs, can be proved to have existed in India at as early a period as in any other country.”[44] [44] _Journal of the American Oriental Society_, vol. vi. p. 477. The minority who hold this view are so few at present that, as has been said, the majority rest in their opposed opinion in all the calmness of conviction. I will now as briefly as possible state the chief arguments put forward, for and against, this conviction. I. In favour of the comparatively late introduction into India of the twelve-fold division of the Zodiac, it is contended that the divisions of the Indian Solar Zodiac so closely resemble those of the Grecian (the Zodiac which we to this day depict on celestial globes), that it is not possible to believe that two nations or two sets of astronomers could independently of each other have imagined the same fanciful and apparently inconsequent series. History does not tell of communication between Greece and India, sufficient to account for this similarity of astronomical method, till after the date of Alexander’s conquest--about 300 B.C. The Greeks could not at that late date have first become acquainted with the figures of the Zodiac, for in Grecian literature of a much earlier age the figures of the Zodiac and other constellations are alluded to as already perfectly well known. As the Greeks therefore could not have learnt all their astronomic lore from the Indians, the Indians must have learnt theirs from the Greeks at some date later than Alexander’s Eastern conquests.