344 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
first grew illegible or were covered up. In the rough courses of the mass of 
masonry of the pyramids the irregularities of the stones of one course were 
let into the course below them ; thus each course bears on it a sort of plan, 
sunk to different levels, showing the stones that came above it. The method 
of fine dressing all the limestone was by carefully picking, as if with a small 
adze, and the standard of flatness appears to have been that no more than a 
couple of inches across should miss touching the true plane within the thick- 
ness of the smear of ochre. The method of quarrying the limstone was by 
driving galleries into the hillside and taking out a stratum of stone, leaving the 
hill standing above on the support of pillars. The manner of raising the blocks 
is not known except by inference, and that points to rocking them and packing 
them up on two piles of timber near the centre, but this does not afford a satis- 
factory explanation of the way in which some of the stones were got into place. 
For instance, the lower granite portcullis of the Second Pyramid, a block that 
would need forty to sixty men to Uft it, was slid on its edge along a passage only 
three and a half feet wide, and then slewed round in a complex way to turn it 
up into the grooves prepared in the rock for it to slide in. Not more than four 
men could well work at it, and these in a cramped space ; hence some great ad- 
vantage of leverage skillfully applied must have been available. 
These investigations of the mechanical methods employed by the pyramid 
builders are but a small portion of the researches carried on by Mr. Petrie during 
two winters' residence in a tomb at Gizeh. The main object of this work was 
the accurate surveying o f the pyramids with instruments of first-class preci'^ion, 
the results being obtained to within one or two tenths of an inch over ground, 
half a mile across, by means of an extensive and closely-checked triangulation. 
We hear that the Royal Sosety have recognized the value of the work by giving 
a grant for its publication from the Government grant for research, and we may 
soon expect to have a full account of the instruments employed, the measurements 
obtained, and the bearing of these on the various theories of the pyramids, besides 
various historical and architectural notes, and a discussion of new methods in the 
mathematical treatment of observations. — Engineering. 
EARLY MAN IN AMERICA. 
W. BOYD DAWKINS. 
Who were the earliest inhabitant of America, and when did they live ? are 
questions which have generally been approached solely from the point of view 
offered by discoveries in the United States, and, until within the last three or 
four years, have been discussed only on the slender basis of the Calaveras skull 
and the implements found in gold-mining in California. In the following essay I 
propose to deal with them as portions of the great problem common to the Old 
and New Worlds, and to show that the first traces of man, as yet discovered, 
prove him to have lived in the same low stage of culture on both sides of the 
