72 FIRESIDE SCIENCE. 



hundred thousand, and thus, through force of num- 

 bers, compensate in some degree for our superior 

 mechanical appliances and intelligent skill. 



No structures ever erected by human hands have 

 excited so much wonder as the pyramids of Egypt. 

 According to Herodotus, one hundred thousand 

 men worked forty years in constructing that of 

 Cheops. It rises into the air four hundred and 

 fifty-two feet, and covers a square whose side is 

 seven hundred and sixty-eight feet, and is built of 

 vast blocks of stone, brought from quarries many 

 miles distant. We are entirely ignorant regarding 

 the means employed to transport and raise these 

 stones to their resting-places. It is not probable, 

 however, that any art or mechanical contrivance 

 superior, or in any respect equal, to those known to 

 us was brought into requisition. It has been es- 

 timated that ten thousand men, in our age, with 

 our machinery, would raise a structure equally 

 vast and imposing in less than fifteen years. 



The subject upon which we have entered, to be 

 treated in a satisfactory manner, requires much 

 more space than the limits of this essay afford. 

 The design has been, merely to give some brief 

 reasons for dissenting from the popular idea that 

 the ancients were acquainted with many arts and 

 processes of superior merit which have been quite 

 lost to us. 



