, the observer occupying the same
central position on every day.

Our notions of astronomy cannot in fact be too crude and too imperfect
if we wish to understand the first beginnings in the reckoning of days
and seasons and years. We cannot expect in those days more than what
any shepherd would know at present of the sun and moon, the stars and
seasons. Nor can we expect any observations of heavenly phenomena
unless they had some bearing on the practical wants of primitive
society.

If then we can watch in India the natural, nay inevitable, growth of
the division of the heaven into twenty-seven equal divisions, each
division marked by stars, which may have been observed and named long
before they were used for this new purpose--if, on the other hand, we
could hardly understand the growth and development of the Indian
ceremonial except as determined by a knowledge of the lunar asterisms,
the lunar months, and the lunar seasons, surely it would be a
senseless hypothesis to imagine that the Vedic shepherds or priests
went to Babylonia in search of a knowledge which every shepherd might
have acquired on the banks of the Indus, and that, after their return
from that country only, where a language was spoken which no Hindu
could understand, they set to work to compose their sacred hymns and
arrange their simple ceremonial. We must never forget that what is
natural in one place is natural in other places also, and we may sum
up without fear of serious contradiction, that no case has been made
out in favor of a foreign origin of the elementary astronomical
notions of the Hindus as found or presupposed in the Vedic hymns.[136]

The Arabs, as is well known, have twenty-eight lunar stations, the
_Manzil_, and I can see no reason why Mohammed and his Bedouins in the
desert should not have made the same observation as the Vedic poets in
India, though I must admit at the same time that Colebrooke has
brought forward very cogent arguments to prove that, in their
scientific employment at least, the Arabic Manzil were really borrowed
from an Indian source.[137]

The Chinese, too, have their famous lunar stations, _the Sieu_,
originally twenty-four in number, and afterward raised to
twenty-eight.[138] But here again there is no necessity whatever for
admitting, with Biot, Lassen, and others, that the Hindus went to
China to gain their simplest elementary notions of lunar chrononomy.
First of all, the Chinese began with twenty-four,