[ 18 ] stars to satisfy his curiosity, so natural in young children, and thus gradually initiated bim into the mysteries of astrology. At this age, his extraordinary desire to test for bimself the position of the stars as they changed night after night was predominanto The determination of lagnas is a very frequent necessity in horoscopy; and the varying positions of the planets among the stars, without a knowledge of which astrological predictions could not be made, led him to watch their movements. This idle curiosity exhibited in star-gazing developed into the habit of a really fruitful study of astronomy. There was, however, no teacher who could instruct him in the science, and he was (and is still) quite ignorant of any language save Sanskrit and his mother-tongue Uriya. He found, however, a few Sanskrit Siddhántas in the family library, and applied himself diligently to master them with tke help of commentaries. At the age of fifteen, when he came to learn the meaning of kagna and the rules for calculating ephemerides of planets, he was surprised to find that neither did the stars appear on the horizon at the right moment, nor could the planets be seen in their right places. Again and again, he measured with a graduated rod the relative distances of the heavenly bodies in the vain hope of finding an agreement between calculation and observation, and, again and again, his hopes were dasked to the ground. Was it possible that the rules and the figures of the famous Siddhantas were not accurate enough, or was it possible that he had made errors in his daily observations ? Correct observation was the only test to settle the question. There were no mathematical instrument-makers to supply him with Digitized by Google
