Colebrooke, in his celebrated essay “On the Vedas, or Sacred Writings of the Hindus” (As. Researches, vol. viii.; Misc. Essays, vol. i.), was the first to direct general attention to the now familiarly known passage of the Jyotisha relative to the position of the solstices in the Hindu lunar zodiac, and to derive from it a date for use in determining the doubtful chronology of the earliest period of literary productiveness in India. His conclusion is expressed as follows: “Hence it is clear, that Dhanishṣhâ and Aslesha are the constellations meant; and that, when this Hindu calendar was regulated, the solstitial points were reckoned to be at the beginning of the one, and in the middle of the other: and such was the situation of those cardinal points in the fourteenth century before the Christian era” (Misc. Essays, vol. i., pp. 109–110). He had a little before (ibid., p. 106) declared that he “inclined to think, that the ceremonies called yajña, and the prayers to be recited at those ceremonies [namely, the prayers constituting the sanhitâs of the three older Vedas], are as old as the calendar.”