... and recorded a series of eclipses extending over a period of thirty-eight hundred and fifty-eight years; and it is probable that they anticipated the Greeks two thousand years in the discovery of the Metonic cycle,—or the cycle of nineteen years, at the end of which time the new moons fall on the same days of the year. The Chinese also determined the obliquity of the ecliptic eleven hundred years before our era. The Hindus at a remote antiquity represented celestial phenomena with considerable ... — Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord