1873.J Geology. 273 



discovery of a number of well-marked species of Lamelli branchiata in beds of 

 an earlier date than those in which their presence had previously been known 

 is of great interest. 



Mr. Henry Woodward has described a new genus of shore-crabs, Litoricola, 

 from the Lower Eocene deposits at Portsmouth ; and a new trilobite, Encri- 

 nurus cristagalli, from the Cape of Good Hope. 



From a letter we have received from Prof. Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer- 

 Royal for Scotland, we find that there has been a good deal of exploring work 

 going on lately at the Great Pyramid. An explorer has been found in 

 Mr. Waynman Dixon, a young engineer of Newcastle-on-Tyne, who has been 

 in Egypt for nearly a year and a half, building an iron bridge across the Nile 

 at Boolak, opposite to the Pyramids. He went out well read up in the new 

 scientific theory of the Great Pyramid, and most earnest to promote its 

 development, and has utilised all his spare time towards that end — latterly 

 indeed, after his bridge was finished, going out to the Pyramid hill, living in 

 the tombs there to be close to the spot, and attended by our old Arab servants 

 as well as some of his own English workmen. His elder brother, Mr. John 

 Dixon, of Cannon Street, London, occasionally went out to help, and some 

 companionship was afforded during part of the time by Dr. Grant, an English 

 physician in Cairo, but the soul of the whole movement was Mr. Waynman 

 Dixon himself. In company with his head carpenter, "Jim Grundy," Mr. W. 

 Dixon has taken casts of critical portions of the coffer, also of the " boss" on 

 the granite leaf, has observed thermometers extensively, and taken several 

 important re-measurings. He has also been boring away in divers places, 

 hoping to find another chamber; but neither chamber nor passage has he yet 

 met with, though in the Queen's chamber he has discovered the inner ends of 

 two small channels like those in the King's chamber. They are rectangular, 

 9" X 8" nearly, go back horizontally about 7 feet, and then rise at an angle of 

 about 32 , and go no one yet knows where. These channels had not been 

 recognised before, as this outcrop into the Queen's chamber had been neatly 

 filled up with a thin plate of white stone, looking superficially like the rock of 

 the walls. One of them is in the north wall, and the other in the south. 

 Inside them were found squeezed out flakes of white mortar (since then 

 analysed by Dr. Wallace, of Glasgow, and found to be not carbonate, but 

 sulphate, of lime), an ordinary "miva" stone-ball weight of the ordinary old 

 "profane" Egyptians, a little bronze sort of grapnel hook, and a little staff of 

 trimmed cedar-like wood a few inches long, but nearly perished. These 

 channels it is proposed to call Dixon's channels. Outside the Pyramid, Mr. W. 

 Dixon has discovered the finest specimen of a loose casing stone of the Great 

 Pyramid known to exist; and he has also, in company with Dr. Grant, made 

 a grand expedition into the Libyan Desert to examine the supposed Pyramid 

 there, hitherto called Dr. Luder's Pyramid. It turned out to be no artificial 

 structure at all, but a natural hill of a conical shape, and near it were abundant 

 remains of silicified tree-trunks lying here and there, with petrified shells and 

 jasper pebbles. From what has been done we may gather — 



(a). The casing stone fragment has five worked surfaces, and two of them 

 being ends, we can measure for the first time the length of a casing stone of 

 the Great Pyramid as well as its angle ; and what is its length ? Twenty-five 

 inches and a fraction, or the sacred and scientific cubit, — not of the profane 

 and idolatrous Egyptians, but of Noah, the Hebrews, and the anciently concealed 

 parts of the Great Pyramid. 



(b). Two measures were made in the extreme passage by Mr. W. Dixon, 

 Dr. Grant touching a line on either wall, supposed to have been drawn for an 

 important purpose by the very architect of the primeval monument himself, 

 and requiring, according to the scientific theory, to show a distance of 2170 

 inches from a crucial part of the interior. The result along the east wall 

 shows 2i70'5, and along the west wall 2170*4, when used in conjunction with 

 Prof. Smyth's measures in " Life and Work," printed long before that theore- 

 tical conclusion had been thought of. 



(c). Mr. John Dixon sent an account and drawings of the findings in Dixon's 

 channels to the " Graphic " newspaper. So far so well. But he also sent 



