Cheiro

"To consider the origin of this Science, we must take our thoughts back to the earliest days of the world's history, and further more to the consideration of a people the oldest of all, yet one that has survived, and who are today as characteristic and as full of individuality as they were when thousands of years ago the first records of history were written."

"I allude to those children of the East, the Hindus, a people whose philosophy and wisdom are every day being more and more revived."

"Looking back to the earliest days of the history of the known world, we find that the first linguistic records belong to the people under consideration, and date back to that far distant cycle of time known as the Aryan civilization. Beyond history we cannot go; but the monuments and cave temples of India, according to the testimony of archaeologists, all point to a time so far beyond the scant history at our disposal, that in the examination of such matters our greatest knowledge is dwarfed into enfantile nothingness - our age and era are but the swaddling clothes of the child; our manhood that of the infant in the arms of the eternity of time."

"Long before Rome or Greece or Israel was even heard of, the mountains of India point back to an age, of learning beyond, and still beyond. From the astronomical calculations that the figures in the Ir temples represent, it has been estimated that the Hindu understood the Precession of the Equinoxes centuries before the Christian era."

"People who in their ignorance disdain the wisdom of ancient races forget that the great past of India contained secrets of life and philosophy that following civilizations could not controvert, but were forced to accept. For instance, it has been demonstrated that the ancient Hindus understood the precession of the equinoxes and made the calculation that it [a complete cycle] took place once in every 25,870 years. The observation and mathematical precision necessary to establish such a theory has been the wonder and admiration of modem astronomers. They, with their modem knowledge and up- to-date instruments, are still quarrelling among themselves as to whether the precession, the most important feature in astronomy, takes place every 25,870 years or every 24,500 years. The majority believes that the Hindus made no mistakes, but how they arrived at such a calculation is as great a mystery as the origin of life itself."