1 871.] The Great Pyramid of Egypt. 23 



difficulty, and how do they treat it ? Some of them with 

 imperious coolness disdainfully ignore it altogether, and go 

 on undisturbedly detailing to their willing readers long lists 

 of paper kings, and the length of the years of their 

 imagined reigns over a period of more than 10,000 years 

 before the Great Pyramid. But a fully honest man, like 

 James Fergusson, freely confesses the tightness of the case 

 he finds himself shut up in, and ingeniously puts forward 

 two attempted explanations — as thus : — 



1st. He hopes that the architecture of those very early and 

 most lengthy theoretical periods will be discovered some 

 day. And,— 



2nd. He has a theory based on facts in his own science, 

 that the first example of any new idea in architecture is 

 always the finest ! 



The former reason, so little complimentary to the present 

 state of our knowledge of the surface of the earth, may be 

 safely left to itself : but the latter one touches a point 

 wherein no one can cross or neglect Mr. Fergusson with 

 impunity; and he lays down, not only that the earliest stone 

 dome, as that of the Pantheon of Rome, is still the finest 

 and largest of its kind existing, but that the first of the 

 rock-cut temples of India is also the grandest of the whole 

 series since excavated, and so with many other varieties of 

 shrines. On which doctrine, if it really applies to the case, 

 Mr. Fergusson would evidently be entitled to claim that the 

 first Pyramid in Egypt ought also to be the grandest and 

 best of the whole subsequent line. 



If it applies, I say; for, while even the Pantheon case 

 (small as it is in the amount of invention or degree of 

 superiority implied, seeing that the Romans had been for 

 ages largely given to introducing stone arches into their 

 buildings, and were at the height of their imperial power 

 and world-drawn wealth when the Pantheon dome was 

 erected, as one only among many other large buildings, so 

 late as about 300 A.D.), is a direct negation that pro- 

 gressive development (usually supposed, even defined, to be 

 supreme within historical times for all teachable arts) 

 applies in this way to architecture, — still it must be evident 

 to everyone that the gulf is almost infinite which separates 

 that little latter-day invention of a stone dome based on a 

 wedged arch, from the untold pre-eminence of the highest of 

 all stone buildings yet erected, when it was also the first, not 

 only of its own kind, but of every kind of building in stone ; 

 and was reared, moreover, in days of the paucity of the human 

 race, in a small country, where no soldiers appear among its 



