A History of Hindu Chemistry, vol. 1

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

Since the days of Sir W. Jones Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a philologist who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and initiated modern studies of Sanskrit., Sanskrit literature, in almost every department, has been zealously ransacked by scholars, both European and Indian. As the result of their labors, we are now in possession of ample facts and data which enable us to form some idea of the knowledge of the Hindus of old in the fields of philosophy and mathematics, including astronomy, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, and geometry. Even medicine has received some share of attention. Wilson in a series of essays published in the Oriental Magazine (1823), Royle in his Antiquity of Hindu Medicine (1837), and Wise in his commentary on the Hindu System of Medicine (1845) were among the first to bring to the notice of the European world the contents of the ancient medical works of the Hindus, and recently the Thakur Sahib of Gondal has added his quota. These contributions are, however, of a fragmentary nature. A comprehensive history of Hindu medicine has yet to be written.