Archaeological Essays Part 16

_What, then, is the exact length of one of its basis lines?_ The sides of the pyramid have been measured by many different measurers. Linear standards have, says Professor Smyth, "been already looked for by many and many an author on the sides of the base of the Great Pyramid, even before they knew that the terminal points of those magnificent base lines had been carefully marked in the solid rock of the hill by the socket-holes of the builders." But--as in the case of the cubic capacity of the coffer--these measurers sadly disagree with each other in their measurements, which, in fact, vary from some 7500 or 8000 inches to 9000 and upwards. Thus, for example, Strabo makes it under 600 Grecian feet, or under 7500 English inches; Dr. Shawe makes it 8040 inches; Shelton makes it 8184 inches; Greaves, 8316; Davison, 8952: Caviglia, 9072; the French academicians, 9163; Dr. Perry, 9360, etc., etc.

At the time at which Professor Smyth was living at the Pyramids, Mr.

Inglis of Glasgow visited it, and, for correct measurement, laid bare for the first time the four corner sockets. Mr. Inglis's measurements not only differed from all the other measurements of "one side" base lines made before him, but he makes the four sides differ from each other; one of them--namely, the north side--being longer than the other three. Strangely, Professor Smyth, though in Egypt for the purpose of measuring the different parts of the pyramid--and holding that its base line ought to be our grand standard of measure, and further holding that the base line could only be accurately ascertained by measuring from socket to socket--never attempted that linear measurement himself after the sockets were cleared. These four corner sockets were never exposed before in historic times; and it may be very long before an opportunity of seeing and using them again shall ever be afforded to any other measurers.

Before the corner sockets were exposed, Professor Smyth attempted to measure the bases, and made each side of the present masonry courses "between 8900 and 9000 inches in length," or (to use his own word) "_about_" 8950 inches for the mean length of one of the four sides of the base; exclusive of the ancient casing and backing stones--which last Colonel Howard Vyse found and measured to be precisely 108 inches on each side, or 216 on both sides. These 216 inches, added to Professor Smyth's measure of "about" 8950 inches, make one side 9166 inches. But Professor Smyth has "elected" (to use his own expression) not to take the mathematically exact measure of the casing stones as given by Colonel Vyse and Mr. Perring, who alone ever saw them and measured them (for they were destroyed shortly after their discovery in 1837), but to take them, without any adequate reason, and contrary to their mathematical measurement, as equal only to 202 inches, and hence "accept 9152 inches as the original length of one side of the base of the finished pyramid." He deems, however, this "determination" not to be so much depended upon as the measurements made from socket to socket.

The mean of the only four series of such socket or casing stone measures as have been recorded hitherto by the French Academicians (9163), Vyse (9168), Mahmoud Bey (9162), and Inglis (9110), amounts to nearly 9150.

The first three of these observers were only able to measure the north side of the pyramid. Mr. Inglis measured all the four sides, and found them respectively 9120, 9114, 9102, and 9102, making a difference of 18 inches between the shortest and longest. Professor Smyth thinks the measures of Mr. Inglis as on the whole probably too _small_, and he takes two of them, 9114 and 9102--(but, strangely, not the largest, 9120)--as data, and strikes a new number out of these two, and out of the three previous measures of the French Academicians, Vyse, and Mahmoud Bey; from these five quant.i.ties making a calculation of "means,"

and electing 9142 as the proper measure of the basis line of the pyramid--(which exact measure certainly none of its many measurers ever yet found it to be); and upon this _foundation_, "derived" (to use his own words) "from the best modern measures yet made," he proceeds to reason, "as the happy, useful, and perfect representation of 9142," and the great standard for linear measure revealed to man in the Great Pyramid. Surely it is a remarkably strange _standard_ of linear measure that can only be thus elicited and developed--not by direct measurement but by indirect logic; and regarding the exact and precise length of which there is as yet no kind of reliable and accurate certainty.

Lately, Sir Henry James, the distinguished head of the Ordnance Survey Department, has shown that the length of one of the sides of the pyramid base, with the casing stones added, as measured by Colonel H. Vyse--viz.

9168 inches--is precisely 360 derahs, or land cubits of Egypt; the derah being an ancient land measure still in use, of the length of nearly 25-1/2 British inches, or, more correctly, of 25488 inches; and he has pointed out that in the construction of the body of the Great Pyramid, the architect built 10 feet or 10 cubits of horizontal length for every 9 feet or 9 cubits of vertical height; while in the construction of the inclined pa.s.sages the proportion was adhered to of 9 on the incline to 4 in vertical height, rules which would altogether simplify the building of such a structure.[254] The Egyptian derah of 2548 inches is practically one-fourth more in length than the old cubit of the city of Memphis. Long ago Sir Isaac Newton showed, from Professor Greaves'

measurements of the chambers, galleries, etc., that the Memphis cubit (or cubit of "ancient Egypt generally") of 1719 English feet,[255] or 20628 English inches, was apparently the _working_ cubit of the masons in constructing the Great Pyramid[256]--an opinion so far admitted more lately by both Messrs Taylor and Smyth; "the length" (says Professor Smyth) "of the cubit employed by the masons engaged in the Great Pyramid building, or that of the ancient city of Memphis," being, he thinks, on an average taken from various parts in the interior of the building, 2073 British inches.[257] According to Mr. Inglis' late measurement of the four bases of the pyramid, after its four corner sockets were exposed, the length of each base line was possibly 442 Memphis cubits, or 9117 English inches; or, if the greater length of the French Academicians, Colonel Vyse, and Mahmoud Bey, be held nearer the truth, 444 Memphis cubits, or 9158 British inches.

But Professor Smyth tries to show that (1.) if 9142 only be granted to him as the possible base line of the pyramid; and (2.) if 25 pyramidal inches be allowed to be the length of the "Sacred Cubit," as revealed to the Israelites (and as revealed in the pyramid), then the base line might be found very near a multiple of this cubit by the days of the year,[258] or by 36525; for these two numbers multiplied together amount to 9131 "pyramidal" inches, or 9140 British inches--the British inch being held, as already stated, to be 1000th less than the pyramidal inch. Was, however, the "Sacred Cubit"--upon whose alleged length of 25 "pyramidal" inches this idea is entirely built--really a measure of this length? In this matter--the most important and vital of all for his whole linear hypothesis--Professor Smyth seems to have fallen into errors which entirely upset all the calculations and inferences founded by him upon it.

_Length of the Sacred Cubit._--Sir Isaac Newton, in his remarkable _Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews_ (republished in full by Professor Smyth in the second volume of his _Life and Work at the Great Pyramid_), long ago came to the conclusion that it measured 25 unciae of the Roman foot, and 6/10 of an uncia, or 24753 British inches; and in this way it was one-fifth longer than the cubit of Memphis--viz. 20628 inches, as previously deduced by him from Greaves' measurements of the King's Chamber and other parts of the interior of the Great Pyramid.

Before drawing his final inference as to the Sacred Cubit being 2475 inches, and as so many steps conducting to that inference, Sir Isaac shows that the Sacred Cubit was some measurement intermediate between a long and moderate human step or pace, between the third of the length of the body of a tall and short man, etc. etc. Professor Smyth has collected several of the estimations thus adduced by Newton as "methods of approach" to circ.u.mscribe the length of the Sacred Cubit, and omitted others. Adding to eight of these alleged data, what he mistakingly avers to be Sir Isaac's deduction of the actual length of the Sacred Cubit in British inches--(namely, 2482 instead of 24753)--as a ninth quant.i.ty, he enters the whole nine in a table as follows:--

_Professor Smyth's Table of Newton's data of Inquiry regarding the Sacred Cubit._[259]

"First between 2328 and 2794 British inches.

Second " 233 279 "

Third " 2480 2502 "

Fourth " 2491 2568[260] "

And Fifth, somewhere near 2482."

"The mean of all which numbers" (Professor Smyth remarks) "amounts to 2507 British inches. The Sacred Cubit, then, of the Hebrews" (he adds) "in the time of Moses--_according to Sir Isaac Newton_--was equal to 2507 British inches, with a probable error of 1."

But--"_according_ to Sir Isaac Newton"--the Sacred Cubit of the Jews was _not_ 2507, as Professor Smyth makes him state in this table, but 2475 British inches, as Sir Isaac himself more than once deliberately infers in his Dissertation.[261] Besides, in such inquiries, is it not altogether illogical to attempt to draw mathematical deductions by these calculations of "means," and especially by using the ninth quant.i.ty in the table--viz. Sir Isaac's own avowed and deliberate deduction regarding the actual length of the Sacred Cubit--as one of the nine quant.i.ties from which that length was to be again deduced by the very equivocal process of "means?" Errors, however, of a far more serious kind exist. The "mean" of the nine quant.i.ties in Professor Smyth's table is, he infers, 2507 inches; and hence he avows that this, or near this figure, is the length of the Sacred Cubit. But the real mean of the nine quant.i.ties which Professor Smyth has collected is not 2507 but 2529--a number in such a testing question as this of a very different value. For the days of the year (36525) when multiplied by this, the true mean of these nine quant.i.ties, would make the base line of the pyramid 9237 inches instead of Professor Smyth's theoretical number of 9142 inches; a difference altogether overturning all his inferences and calculations thereanent. And again, if we take Sir Isaac Newton's own conclusion of 2475, and multiply it by the days of the year, the pretended length of the pyramid base comes out as low as 9039.

_Alleged "really glorious Consummation" in Geodesy._

The incidentally but totally erroneous summation which Professor Smyth thus makes of the nine equivocal quant.i.ties in his table, as amounting to 2507, he declares (to use his own strong words) as a "_really glorious consummation_ for the geodesical science of the present day to have brought to light;" for he avers this length of 2507--(which he forthwith elects to alter and change, without any given reason whatever, to 25025 British inches)--being, he observes, "practically the sacred Hebrew cubit, is _exactly_ one ten-millionth (1-10,000,000th) of the earth's semi-axis of rotation; and _that is_ the very best mode of reference to the earth-ball as a whole, for a linear standard through all time, that the highest science of the existing age of the world has yet struck out or can imagine. In a word, the Sacred Cubit, _thus_ realised, forms an instance of the most advanced and perfected human science supporting the truest, purest, and most ancient religion; while a linear standard which the chosen people in the earlier ages of the world were merely told by maxim to look on as _sacred_, compared with other cubits of other lengths, is proved by the progress of human learning in the latter ages of time, to have had, and still to have, a philosophical merit about it which no men or nations at the time it was first produced, or within several thousand years thereof, could have possibly thought of for themselves." Besides, adds he elsewhere, "an _extraordinarily_[262] convenient length too, for man to handle and use in the common affairs of life is the one ten-millionth of the earth's semi-axis of rotation when it comes to be realised, for it is extremely close to the ordinary human arm, or to the ordinary human pace in walking, with a purpose to measure."

Of course all these inferences and averments regarding the Sacred Cubit being an exact segment of the polar axis disappear, when we find Sir Isaac Newton's length of the Sacred Cubit is not, as Professor Smyth elects it to be, 25025 British inches; nor 2507, as he incorrectly calculated it to be from the mean of the nine quant.i.ties selected and arranged in his table; nor 2529, as is the actual mean of these nine quant.i.ties in his table; but, "_according_ to Sir Isaac Newton's" own reiterated statement and conclusion, 24753. (See footnote, p. 245.) A Sacred Cubit, according to Sir Isaac Newton's admeasurements of it, of 2475 inches, would not, by thousands of cubits, be one ten-millionth of the measure of the semi-polar axis of the earth; provided the polar axis be, as Professor Smyth elects it to be, 500,500,000 British inches.[263]

AXIS OF THE EARTH AS A STANDARD OF MEASURE.

The standards of measure in France and some other countries are, as is well known, referred to divisions of arcs of the meridian, measured off upon different points of the surface of the earth. These measures of arcs of the meridian, as measurements of a known and selected portion of the surface of the spheroidal globe of the earth, have, more or less, fixed mathematical relations with the axis of the earth; as the circ.u.mference of a sphere has an exact mathematical ratio to its diameter. The difference in length of arcs of the meridian at different parts of the earth's surface, in consequence of the spheroidal form of the globe of the earth, has led to the idea that the polar diameter or axis of the earth would form a more perfect and more universal standard than measurements of the surface of the earth. In the last century, Ca.s.sini[264] and Callet[265] proposed, on these grounds, that the polar axis of the earth should be taken as the standard of measure. Without having noticed these propositions of Ca.s.sini and Callet,[266] Professor Smyth adopts the same idea, and avers that 4000 years ago it had been adopted and used also by the builders of the Great Pyramid, who laid out and measured off the basis of the pyramid as a multiple by the days of the year of the Sacred Cubit, and hence of the Pyramidal Cubit while the Sacred or Pyramidal Cubit were both the results of superhuman or divine knowledge, and were both, or each, one ten-millionth of the semi-polar axis of the earth. We have already seen, however, that the Sacred Cubit, "_according_ to Sir Isaac Newton," is not a multiple by the days of the year of the base line of the Great Pyramid; and is not one twenty-millionth of the polar axis of the earth, when that polar axis is laid down as measuring, according to the numbers elected by Professor Smyth, 500,500,000 British inches.

But is there any valid reason whatever for fixing and determining, as an ascertained mathematical fact, the polar axis of the earth to be this very precise and exact measure, with its formidable tail of cyphers?

None, except the supposed requirements or necessities of Professor Smyth's pyramid metrological theory. The latest and most exact measurements are acknowledged to be those of Captain Clarke, who, on the doctrine of the earth being a spheroid of revolution computes the polar axis to be 500,522,904 British inches, calculating it from the results of all the known arcs of meridian measures. If we grant that the Sacred Cubit could be allowed to be exactly 25025 inches, which Sir Isaac Newton found it not to be; and if we grant that the polar axis is exactly 500,500,000 British inches, which Captain Clarke did not find it to be; then, certainly, as shown by Professor Smyth, there would be 20,000,000 of these supposit.i.tious pyramidal cubits, or 500,000,000 of the supposit.i.tious pyramidal inches in this supposit.i.tious polar axis of the earth. "In so far, then" (writes Professor Smyth), "we have in the 5, with the many 0's that follow, a pyramidally commensurable and symbolically appropriate unit for the earth's axis of rotation." But such adjustments have been made with as great apparent exact.i.tude when entirely different earth-axes and quant.i.ties were taken. Thus Mr. John Taylor shows the inches, cubits, and axes to answer precisely, although he took as his standard a totally different diameter of the earth from Professor Smyth. The diameter of the earth at 30 of lat.i.tude--the geographical position of the Great Pyramid--is, he avers, some seventeen miles, or more exactly 17652 miles longer than at the poles.[267] But Mr. Taylor fixed upon this diameter of the earth at lat.i.tude 30--and not, like Professor Smyth, upon its polar diameter--as the standard for the metrological linear measures of the Great Pyramid; and yet, though the standard was so different, he found, like Mr. Smyth, 500,000,000 of inches also in his axis, and 20,000,000 of cubits also.[268] The resulting figures appear to fit equally as well for the one as for the other. Perhaps they answer best on Mr. Taylor's scheme. For Mr. Taylor maintained that the diameter of the earth before the Flood, at this selected point of 30, was less by nearly 37 miles than what it was subsequently to the flood,[269] and is now; a point by which he accounts for otherwise unaccountable circ.u.mstances in the metrological doctrines which have been attempted to be connected with the Great Pyramid. For while Mr. Taylor believes the Sacred Cubit to be 2488, or possibly 2490 British inches, he holds the new Pyramidal cubit to be 25 inches in full; and the Sacred and Pyramidal cubits to be different therefore from each other, though both inspired. In explanation of this startling difference in two measures supposed to be equally of sacred[270] origin, Mr. Taylor observes--"The smaller 2488 is the Sacred Cubit which measured the diameter of the Earth _before_ the Flood; the one by which Noah measured the Ark, as tradition says; and the one in accordance with which all the interior works of the Great Pyramid were constructed.[271] The larger (25) is the Sacred Cubit of the _present_ Earth, according to the standard of the Great Pyramid when it was completed."

Surely such marked diversities and contradictions, and such strange hypothetical adjustments and re-adjustments of the data and calculations, entirely upset the groundless and extraordinary theory of the base of the pyramid being a standard of linear measurement; or a segment of any particular axis of the earth; or a standard for emitting a system of new inches and new cubits;--seeing, on the one hand, more particularly, that the basis line of the pyramid is still itself an unknown and undetermined linear quant.i.ty, as is also the polar axis of the earth of which it is declared and averred to be an ascertained, determined, and measured segment.

M. Paucton, in 1780, wrote a work in which he laid down the base side of the pyramid as 8754 inches; maintained, like Mr. Taylor and Mr. Smyth, that this length was a standard of linear measures; found it to be the measure of a portion of a degree of the meridian, such degree being itself the 360th part of a circle;--and apparently the calculations and figures answered as well as when the measurement was declared to be 9142 inches, and the line not a segment of an arc of the circ.u.mference of the earth, but a segment of the polar axis of the earth; for De l'Isle lauds Paucton's meridian degree theory as one of the wondrous efforts of human genius, or (to use his own words) "as one of the chief works of the human mind!" Yet the errors into which Paucton was seduced in miscalculating the base line of the Pyramid as 8754 inches, and the other ways he was misled, are enough--suggests Professor Smyth--"to make poor Paucton turn in his grave."

SIGNIFICANCE OF CYPHERS AND FIVES.

M. Paucton, Mr. Taylor, and those who have adopted and followed their pyramid metrological ideas, seem to imagine that if, by multiplying one of their measures or objects, they can run the calculation out into a long tail of terminal 0's, then something very exact and marvellous is proved. "When" (upholds Mr. Taylor), "we find in so complicated a series of figures as that which the measures of the Great Pyramid and of the Earth require for their expression, _round numbers_ present themselves, or such as leave no remainder, we may be sure we have arrived at _primitive_ measures." But many small and unimportant objects, when thus multiplied sufficiently, give equally startling strings of 0's. Thus, if the polar axis of the earth be held as 500,000,000 inches, and Sir Isaac Newton's "Sacred Cubit" be held, as Professor Smyth calculated it to be, viz. 2482 British inches--then the long diameter of the brim of the lecturer's hat, measuring 124 inches, is 1-40,000,000th of the earth's polar axis; a page of the print of the Society's Transactions is 1-60,000,000th of the same; a print page of Professor Smyth's book, 62 inches in length, is 1-80,000,000th of this "great standard;" etc. etc.

etc.

Professor Smyth seems further to think that the figure or number "five"

plays also a most important symbolical and inner part in the configuration, structure, and enumeration of the Great Pyramid. "The pyramid" (says he) "embodies in a variety of ways the importance of five." It is itself "five-angled, and with its plane a five-sided solid, in which everything went by fives, or numbers of fives and powers of five." "With five, then, as a number, times of five, and powers of five, the Great Pyramid contains a mighty system of consistently subdividing large quant.i.ties to suit human happiness." To express this, Mr. Smyth suggests the new noun "fiveness." But it applies to many other matters as strongly, or more strongly than to the Great Pyramid. For instance, the range of rooms belonging to the Royal Society is "five" in number; the hall in which it meets has five windows; the roof of that hall is divided into five transverse ornamental sections; and each of these five transverse sections is subdivided into five longitudinal ones; the books at each end of the hall are arranged in ten rows and six sections--making sixty, a multiple of five; the official chairs in the hall are ten in number, or twice five; the number of benches on one side for ordinary fellows is generally five; the office-bearers of the Society are twenty-five in number, or five times five; and so on. These arrangements were doubtless, in the first instance, made by the Royal Society without any special relation to "fiveness," or the "symbolisation" of five; and there is not the slightest ground for any belief that the apparent "fiveness" of anything in the Great Pyramid had a different origin.

GREAT MINUTENESS OF MODERN PRACTICAL STANDARDS OF GAUGES.

In all these "standards" of capacity and length alleged to exist about the Great Pyramid, not only are the theoretical and actual sizes of the supposed "standards" made to vary in different books--which it is impossible for an actual "standard" to do--but the evidences adduced in proof of the conformity of old or modern measures with them is notoriously defective in complete aptness and accuracy. Measures, to be true counterparts, must, in mathematics, be not simply "near," or "very near," which is all that is generally and vaguely claimed for the supposed pyramidal proofs, but they must be entirely and _exactly_ alike, which the pyramidal proofs and so-called standards fail totally and altogether in being. Mathematical measurements of lines, sizes, angles, etc., imply exact.i.tude, and not mere approximation; and without that exact.i.tude they are not mathematical, and--far more--are they not "superhuman" and "inspired."

Besides, it must not be forgotten that our real _practical_ standard measures are infinitely more refined and many thousand-fold more delicate than any indefinite and equivocal measures alleged to be found in the pyramid by even those who are most enthusiastic in the pyramidal metrological theory. At the London Exhibition in 1851, that celebrated mechanician and engineer, Mr. Whitworth, of Manchester, was the first to show the possibility of ascertaining by the sense of touch alone the one-millionth of an inch in a properly-adjusted standard of linear measure; and in his great establishment at Manchester they work and construct machinery and tools of all kinds with differences in linear measurements amounting to one ten-thousandth of an inch. The standards of the English inch, etc., made by him for the Government--and now used by all the engine and tool makers, etc., of the United Kingdom--lead to the construction of machinery, etc., to such minute divisions; and the adoption of these standards has already effected enormous saving to the country by bringing all measured metal machinery, instruments, and tools, wherever constructed and wherever afterwards applied and used, to the same identical series of mathematical and precise gauges.

THE SABBATH, ETC. TYPIFIED IN THE PYRAMID.

The communication next discussed some others amongst the many and diversified matters which Professor Smyth fancifully averred to be typified and symbolised in the Great Pyramid.

One, for example, of the chambers in the Great Pyramid--the so-called Queen's Chamber--has a roof composed of two large blocks of stone leaning against each other, making a kind of slanting or double roof.

This double roof, and the four walls of the chamber count six, and typify, according to Professor Smyth, the six days of the week, whilst the floor counts, as it were, a seventh side to the room, "n.o.bler and more glorious than the rest," and typifying something, he conceives, of a "n.o.bler and more glorious order"--namely, the Sabbath; it is surely difficult to fancy anything more strange than this strange idea.[272] In forming this theory liberties are also confessedly taken with the floor in order to make it duly larger than the other six sides of the room, and to do so he theoretically lifts up the floor till it is placed higher than the very entrance to the chamber; for originally the floor and sides are otherwise too nearly alike in size to make a symbolic _seven_-sided room with one of the sides proportionally and properly larger than the other six sides. Yet Professor Smyth holds that, in the above typical way, he has "shown," or indeed "proved entirely," that the Sabbath had been heard of before Moses, and that thus he finds unexpected and confirmatory light of a fact which, he avers, is of "extraordinary importance, and possesses a ramifying influence through many departments of religious life and progress."

He believes, also, that the corner-stone--so frequently alluded to by the Psalmist and the Apostles as a symbol of the Messiah--is the head or corner-stone of the Great Pyramid, which, though long ago removed, may yet possibly, he thinks, be discovered in the Cave of Machpelah; though how, why, or wherefore it should have found its way to that distant and special locality is not in any way solved or suggested.

GREAT PYRAMID ALLEGED TO BE A SUPERHUMAN, AND MORE OR LESS AN INSPIRED METROLOGICAL ERECTION.

Professor Smyth holds the Great Pyramid to be in its emblems, and intentions and work "superhuman;" as "not altogether of human origination; and in that case whereto" (he asks) "should we look for any human a.s.sistance to men but from Divine inspiration?" "Its metrology is," he conceives, "directed by a higher Power" than man; its erection "directed by the _fiat_ of Infinite Wisdom;" and the whole "built under the direction of chosen men divinely inspired from on high for this purpose."

If of this Divine origin, the work should be absolutely perfect; but, as owned by Professor Smyth, the structure is not entirely correct in its orientation, in its squareness, etc. etc.--all of them matters proving that it is human, and not superhuman. It was, Professor Smyth further alleges, intended to convey standards of measures to all times down to, and perhaps beyond, these latter days, "to herald in some of those accompaniments of the promised millennial peace and goodwill to all men." Hence, if thus miraculous in its forseen uses, it ought to have remained relatively perfect till now. But "what feature of the pyramid is there" (asks Professor Smyth) "which renders at once in its measurements in the present day its ancient proportions? None." If the pyramid were a miracle of this kind, then the Arabian Caliph Al Mamoon so far upset the supposit.i.tious miracle a thousand years ago--(of course he could not have done so provided the miracle had been truly Divine)--when he broke into the King's Chamber and unveiled its contents; inasmuch as the builders, according to Professor Smyth, intended to conceal its secrets for the benefit of these latter times, and for this purpose had left a mathematical sign of two somewhat diagonal lines or joints in the floor of the descending pa.s.sage, by which secret sign or clue[273] some men or man in the far distant future, visiting the interior, should detect the entrance to the chambers; and which secret sign Professor Smyth himself was, as he believes, the first "man" to discover two years ago. The secret, however, thus averred to be placed there for the detection of the entrance to the interior chambers in these latter times, has been discovered some 1000 years at least too late for the evolution of the alleged miraculous arrangement. And in relation to the Great Pyramid, as to other matters, we may be sure that G.o.d does not teach by the medium of miracle anything that the unaided intellect of man can find out; and we must beware of erroneously and disparagingly attributing to Divine inspiration and aid, things that are imperfect and human.

The communication concluded by a series of remarks, in which it was pointed out that at the time at which the Great Pyramid was built, probably about 4000 years ago, mining, architecture, astronomy, etc., were so advanced in various parts of the East as to present no obstacle in the way of the erection of such magnificent mausoleums, as the colossal Great Pyramid and its other congener pyramids undoubtedly are.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 233: See on other proposed significations and origins of the word pyramid, APPENDIX, No. I.]

[Footnote 234: In the plain of Troy, and on the higher grounds around it, various barrows still remain, and have been described from Pliny, Strabo, and Lucia down to Lechevalier, Forchhammer, and Maclaren. In later times, Choiseul and Calvert have opened some of them. Homer gives a minute account of the obsequies of Patroclus and the raising of his burial-mound, which forms, as is generally believed, one of those twin barrows still existing on the sides of the Sigean promontory, that pa.s.s under the name of the tumuli of Achilles and Patroclus. Pope, in translating the pa.s.sage describing the commencement of the funeral pyre, uses the word pyramid. For