226 Epidemics. 



not suffer the skill and science of the magi to die out before 

 successors could suitably take their place. " Seeing that life 

 was becoming so much shorter, and the time allotted for acquiring 

 precise knowledge, from long experience, was getting too curtailed to 

 allow of experts becoming thoroughly finished astrologers and wise 

 diviners, therefore the masons received the order to build us 

 a temple of Time, and a place for a standard of measure and 

 weight, that our successors be not robbed of their revenue, 

 which is paid by both these standards ; which done, our best 

 deed for our posterity will be completed." Such is supposed 

 to be the spirit of the instructions to the Masons of " The 

 Great Pyramid," which is left as a monument of a long- 

 lived age ; but, through the onward curtailing of days, 

 it never served the purpose for which it was designed, 

 as a perfect and beautiful sun-dial of great use to the 

 State, and of daily study for the magi ; it has only re- 

 mained as an idle monument of human decay, to speak in 

 these latter days of the times and doings of a bygone 

 epidemic period, which has given us but this one amazing 

 monument of the learning and comprehensiveness of 

 those who lived in an age of great longevity,* which, 



*' The Great Pyramid was built as an imperishable monument to an- 

 ticipate and preserve the labours of experts in science from being lost 

 by the rapid decline of human longevity is manifest from its site, where 

 rain rarely falls ; its entire want of architectural beauty ; its singular 

 construction for the equal distribution of weight ; its perfect uselessness 

 as a dwelling-place ; the intricacy of the way to its central chamber 

 affording secresy ; its marvellous adaptation to preserve a standard 

 of weight by securing water undisturbed from external sources, and of a 

 fixed temperature ; its dry measure being of imperishable stone, and 

 the chamber itself of those dimensions which give as a standard of 

 measure the earth's diameter reducible to the inch. Secresy is one 

 important matter in the whole, and is certainly the best kept by trans- 

 mission to a limited number, from generation to generation, as among 

 the Hindoos ; but where decay of life is so rapid, such transmission in 

 the Chronographic Epidemic was impossible, as father and son and 

 Preceptor would all die old men about one and the same time. Hence 

 the need of an imperishable Temple to Science, but was in its day pro- 

 bably called a "Temple to Time." 



