Soon also his Oriental studies gave him a new interest in the country and the people. The first allusions to Oriental literature occur in a letter dated Patna, December 10, 1786. It is addressed to his father, who had desired some information concerning the religion of the Hindus. Colebrooke’s own interest in Sanskrit literature was from the first scientific rather than literary. His love of mathematics and astronomy made him anxious to find out what the Brahmans had achieved in these branches of knowledge. It is surprising to see how correct is the first communication which he sends to his father on the four modes of reckoning time adopted by Hindu astronomers, and which he seems chiefly to have drawn from Persian sources. The passage (pp. 23-26) is too long to be given here, but we recommend it to the careful attention of Sanskrit scholars, who will find it more accurate than what has but lately been written on the same subject. Colebrooke treated, again, of the different measures of time in his essay “On Indian Weights and Measures,” published in the “Asiatic Researches,” 1798; and in stating the rule for finding the planets which preside over the day, called _Horâ_, he was the first to point out the coincidence between that expression and our name for the twenty-fourth part of the day. In one of the notes to his Dissertation on the Algebra of the Hindus he showed that this and other astrological terms were evidently borrowed by the Hindus from the Greeks, or other external sources; and in a manuscript note published for the first time by Sir E. Colebrooke, we find him following up the same subject, and calling attention to the fact that the word _Horâ_ occurs in the Sanskrit vocabulary--the _Medinî-Kosha_, and bears there, among other significations, that of the rising of a sign of the zodiac, or half a sign. This, as he remarks, is in diurnal motion one _hour_, thus confirming the connection between the Indian and European significations of the word.