This moderate, and, as it reads, judicial opinion of Varāhamihira, touching the superiority of the native _Sūrya Siddhānta_ over the Pauliśa and Romaka Siddhāntas, may be appealed to as not conveying the impression that when Varāha wrote his co-religionists and scientists were accepting, wholesale and with avidity, Grecian astronomic methods in place of their own already well-established native science. It is true that in Varāha’s work many words evidently of Grecian origin are to be met with; and some scholars have claimed that these “Greek terms occurring in Varāhamihira’s writings are conclusive proofs of the Greek origin of Hindu astronomy.” That such terms should occur in a work professedly a _resumé_ of five astronomic treatises--some of them Indian, and some European--can scarcely be considered as conclusive proof that in the writer’s time no purely Indian astronomic science existed. Varāha’s writings suggest an author interested in comparing the resemblances and the differences to be met with in home and foreign methods, rather than one introducing for the first time important astronomic truths to the notice of his readers. It may be further urged that the claims to antiquity in Sanscrit astronomical works are so well known, that those who adopt the Grecian theory must necessarily throw discredit in a very wholesale manner on all their authors. Bentley’s furious diatribes may be quoted as an extreme example of the way in which the evidence of such Sanscrit claimants to antiquity is sometimes dealt with; and it may be pointed out that such violent denunciation cannot be looked on as convincing argument. “The fact is,” writes Bentley, “that literary forgeries are now so common in India, that we can hardly know what book is genuine, and what not: perhaps there is not one book in a hundred, nay, probably in a thousand, that is not a forgery, in some point of view or other; and even those that are allowed or supposed to be genuine, are found to be full of interpolations, to answer some particular ends: nor need we be surprised at all this, when we consider the facilities they have for forgeries, as well as their own general inclination and interest in following that profession; for to give the appearance of antiquity to their books and authors increases their value, at least in the eyes of some. Their universal propensity to forgeries, ever since the introduction of the modern system of astronomy and immense periods of years, in A.D. 538, are but too well known to require any further elucidation than those already given. They are under no restraint of laws, human or divine, and subject to no punishment, even if detected in the most flagrant literary impositions.”[51] [51] _A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy_, etc., p. 181.