ately, and find that the little hand moves over the twelfth
of a circle every hour, and the large hand around the circle in the same
time, and that the large hand, now at noon, covers the little one, I
can calculate, that at sixteen minutes and a quarter past three it will
nearly cover it again; but then, it is just as easy to count that the
two hands were covered at sixteen minutes and a quarter before nine that
morning, or that they were exactly in line at 6 A. M. If my clock would
keep going at the same rate for a thousand years, I could predict the
position of the hands at any hour of the twenty-ninth of March, of the
year 2857; but it is evident that the very same calculation applied the
other way would show the position that the hands would have had a
thousand years ago, or five thousand years ago, just as well. And if I
were to allege that my clock was made by Tubal Cain, before the flood,
and for proof of the fact declare, that on the first of January, 3857 B.
C., at 6 o'clock P. M., I had seen the two hands directly in line, and
some wiseacre were to calculate the time, and find that at that hour the
hands ought to have been just in that position, and conclude thence that
I was undoubtedly one of the antediluvians, and the clock no less
certainly a specimen of the craft of the first artificer in brass and
iron, the argument would be precisely parallel to the Infidel's argument
from the Tirvalore Tables, and the astronomy of the Vedas.

But suppose my clock ran a little slow; say half a minute in the month,
or so; or that it was made to keep sidereal time, which differs by a
little from solar time, and that I did not know exactly what the
difference was; it is evident that on a long stretch of some hundreds or
thousands of years, I would get out of my reckoning, and the hands would
not have been in the positions I had calculated. Now, this was just what
happened with the Brahmins and their calculations. The clock of the
heavens keeps a uniform rate of going, but they made a slight mistake in
the counting of it; and so did their Infidel friends. But our modern
astronomers have got the true time, set their clocks, and made their
tables by it; and on applying these tables to the pretended Hindoo
observations, find that they are all wrong, and that no such eclipses as
they allege ever did occur or possibly could have happened in our solar
system.[219] So the Hindoo astronomy is now consigned to the same tomb
with the