34 The Great Pyramid of Egypt. [January, 



probably twenty times, more accurate in their outside masonry 

 than the modern Museum officers have been in their 

 indoor adjustments. 



Wherefore, then I looked around at the locality to which 

 these precious fragments of earliest intellectual antiquity 

 have been dragged, far from their true place in the world ; 

 and for what ? 



A grand gallery of the British Museum, architecturally, 

 is the Egyptian ; but, as to its contents, almost wholly 

 given over to idolatry. "No, no," says one apologist, "only 

 to the fine arts." Well, then, to that most subtle and truly 

 fine of all the fine arts, " Theotechny ;" for hardly is there a 

 single statue of a cat-headed, or baboon-headed, or unclean 

 dog-headed idol, recovered from any part of idolatrous Egypt 

 or sensual Nubia, but it has had a magnificent pedestal of 

 Aberdeen granite prepared for it, at an expense rarely sanc- 

 tioned by Government for anything scientific, and has then 

 been set up under an imposing light, to be the gazing-stock 

 and cynosure of a supposed admiring and Christian public ; 

 while those far earlier works of man, the casing stones of 

 the Great Pyramid, which have no idolatry, nor human 

 theotechny either, about them, but only the perfection of 

 mechanical execution, and the exact embodiment of special 

 angles in geometry and astronomy, in a noble cause and for 

 a purpose recently supposed by some to be in direct con- 

 nection with Revelation — they are shoved away contemptuously 

 into an outer passage under a low shelf of a sort of cupboard ; 

 and even there are destroyed in their teaching by atrocious 

 modern blunders in levelling. 



Knowing the priority of the Great Pyramid to all their 

 other architectural remains (for they have themselves pub- 

 lished it), what a magnificent beginning to their Egyptian 

 gallery, — and with that, to their microcosmal exhibition, 

 of all human architecture — might not the officers of the 

 Museum have made by erecting there, in addition to their 

 fragments of actual Great Pyramid casing-stones — properly 

 levelled, — full size models, both ' of Colonel Howard Vyse's 

 two complete casing-stones, with their infinitely fine joints 

 and admirable surfaces as he found them there in situ, and 

 also of one of the outer corner-stone sockets of the whole 

 building — accompanied by modern levels on a large scale 

 and refined angular instruments to test the position, and 

 exhibit the ancient angles so clearly to all comers that those 

 who ran might read. 



Then would there have been visible proof before the British 

 public, that the earliest known material remains of intellectual 



