"‘Mons. Bailly, the celebrated author of the History of Astronomy, may be regarded as beginning the concert of praises, upon this branch of the science of the Hindus. The grounds of his conclusions were certain astronomical tables; from which he inferred, not only advanced progress in the science, but a date so ancient as to be entirely inconsistent with the chronology of the Hebrew Scriptures. [...] Another cause of great distrust attaches to Mons. Bailly, Voltaire, and other excellent writers in France, abhorring the evils which they saw attached to catholicism, laboured to subvert the authority of the books on which it was founded. Under this impulse, they embraced [...] the tales respecting the great antiquity of the Chinese and Hindus as disproving, entirely, the Mosaic accounts of the duration of the present race of men. [...] The argument [...] by Mons. Bailly, was [...] for a time regarded as a demonstration in form of the falsehood of Christianity.’ ‘... the extravagant disposition of the Hindus to falsify with regard to dates, and make almost everything, with respect to their own transactions and attainments, more ancient than it is...’ ‘When an opinion is obviously contradicted by a grand train of circumstances, and is not entirely supported by the special proof on which it pretends to rest, it is unproved; and whatever is unproved, and out of the known order of nature, is altogether unworthy of belief; deserves simple rejection.’ ‘It is unfortunately from Diophantus alone, that we derive any knowledge of the attainments of the Greeks in this branch of mathematics. It is no less unfortunate, that out of thirteen books which he wrote upon this subject, only six, or possibly seven, have been preserved. How does Mr. Colebrooke know, that these other books of Diophantus did not ascend to more difficult points of the science [implying that Hindus borrowed this algebra from these lost works]? [...] Supposing that nothing more of Algebra was known to the Greeks, at the time of Diophantus, than is found in seven out of thirteen books of one author, which is a pretty handsome allowance; is it certain or is it probable, that when the Greeks had made so considerable a progress, they remained stationary? and, though the most ingenious and inventive people in the world, peculiarly at that time turned to mathematical and abstruse investigations, they made no addition through several generations, to what was taught them by Diophantus? This argument appears to be conclusive. ‘We may, if we please, assume that all of them [Sanskrit texts that Colebrooke translated] in a body are less than a century old.’ Brahmins, who were ‘accustomed and prone to forgery [and] there is security for nothing which they had any interest, real or imaginary, to change’, ‘Whoever, in the present improved state of our knowledge, shall take the trouble to contemplate the proof which we possess of the state of knowledge and civilization among the Hindus, canform no other conclusion, but that everything [...] bears clear, concurring, and undeniable testimony to the ignorance of the Hindus, and the low state of civilization in which they remain.’"