"The astronomer and onetime mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, in his Histoire de I'astronomie ancienne et moderne (1805), felt that "these tables of the Brahmana are perhaps five or six thousand years old" (53;). Bailly approved of the traditional date of the Kali Yuga, and seemed to have convinced at least some of his colleagues such as Laplace and Playfair of the accuracy of the Indian astronomical claims (Kay, [1924] 1981, 2). This was bitterly opposed by another astronomer, John Bentley ([1825] 1981), with a concern that we have seen was typical for the times: "If we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction" (xxvii)."