REMOVAL OF CLEOPATRAS NEEDLE TO NEW VORK. ain 
REMOVAL OF CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE FROM EGYPT 
TO NEW YORK. 
Through the skill of Lieutenant Commander Gorringe, of the United States 
Navy, backed by the splendid liberality of one of New York’s citizens, Mr. W. 
H. Vanderbilt, who has borne the entire expense of the undertaking, the remain- 
ing ‘‘Cleopatra’s Needle,” which was presented some time ago by the Khedive of 
Egypt to the United States, has been finally safely lowered from its pedestal to the 
ground; and if no unforeseen accident should occur, may be expected to reach 
our shores in the early part of the coming summer. 
Obelisks are the most simple monuments of Egyptian architecture, and among 
the most interesting that antiquity has transmitted to us, from the remoteness of 
their origin, and the doubt in which we still remain as to the period when set up- 
The oldest which now remains to us is still standing at Heliopolis, near Cairo— 
the On Ramses or Beth-Shemesh of the Hebrew Scriptures. Abraham was unborn, 
and the Pentateuch of Moses was unwritten when the inhabitant of Heliopolis 
adored his gods in the Temple of the Sun and read upon the obelisk, still in its 
place, the name of Harmachis and that of King Osortisen, who then reigned and 
reared it, and to whom Mariette Bey assigns the date of 2,851 years B. C. Pliny 
says that the Egyptian term for an obelisk conveyed the idea of a sun’s ray, which 
its form was supposed to symbolize. The term obelisk is derived from the Greek 
obelos, which meant a ‘‘spit”’—a term which the witty epigrammatics gave them, 
with the view, like all wits in such cases, to cover with an air of ridicule what 
they could not controvert by reason. Obelisks have, from the earliest periods of 
antiquity, been regarded as remarkable monuments of the skill and perseverance 
of remote ages. They must ever be considered as valuable records of the ancient 
history of the Egyptians, and of the skill of those periods; monumental evidences 
of their sovereigns and their warlike exploits. Extracted with vast labor from their 
_ quarries as monoliths, conveyed six or seven hundreds of miles down the Nile and 
erected with difficulty in front of their temples by kings to commemorate their 
victories and record their various names and titles, they are emblems of both the 
perseverance and love of glory of the Egyptians and their rulers. ‘The very fact 
of their being transported to Europe by the ancient Romans under their emperors 
shows the high value in which they were held by that people, as witnesses of their 
own world-wide victories in remote regions. 
The Egyptians set great value upon the size of their monoliths, and if a large 
block was extracted from a quarry not quite corresponding in all its sides, whether 
as to size or form, they would without scruple use it for their immediate purpose, 
or shape it as near as possible to the object they had in view, without diminishing 
its size. The consequence is that many of thir obelisks, pedestals, and sarcophagi, 
where one would have supposed the most scrupulous attention to uniformity would 
have existed, are irregular in shape. The sides of an obelisk rarely corresponded 
