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- solar eclipse in 3560 A. D. Like him Chandrasekhara,
received his education from his uncle, and the same search after the unknown led our Indian Tycho to penetrate the mysterious destinies of men with the help of astrology. It is said that all sciences had their origin in wonder, and it is pre-eminently true of astronomy. Nothing but stargazing could have excited the simple yet noble utterances of the Vedic Rishis, and star gazing has given birth to a Hipparchus and a Galileo, and may we add, to the Tycho of Europe and the Tycho of India ? The European Tycho had Copernicus before him and the long ascendancy of the Almagest was fast coming to a close. Chandrasekhara': Almagest was Súrya-Siddhanta, and his Copernicus was Bhaskara. Both Tycho and Chandrasekhara detected at an early age discrepancies between observation and calculation, Tycho beld and Chandra sekhara still holds the same views about the solar system. The Copernican theory was before Tycho, and Chandrasekhara knew the theory of Aryabhata, and, we may add, heard not only of the diurnal rotation of the earth propounded by the renowned Afryabhaga, but of the annual revolution of the earth round the sun from modern Geography. But both declined to accept the new theory on almost precisely the same grounds. Tycho rejected the Copernican theory chiefly for two reasons. "One reason," says Professor Young, "was that it was unfavourably regarded by the clergy, and he was a good churchman. The other was the scientific objection that if the earth moved round the sun, the fixed stars all ought to appear to move in a corresponding manner, each star describing annually an oval in the heavens of the same apparent dimensions as the earth's orbit itself, seen from Digitized by Google
