( 1 6 ) [January, 



II. THE GREAT PYRAMID OF EGYPT, 



FROM A MODERN SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW. 



By C. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland. 



Part I. 



Hearing, discussing, and disposing of the older claims, of History (as hitherto 

 written), Architecture, Archaeology, Egyptology, Progressive development, 

 " Theotechny," and the British Museum, to explain any of the chief data 

 of the Great Pyramid. 



i. Touching the General Status of both the Structure and its 

 Primeval Authors. 



ELDOM does a practical astronomer occupy himself 

 much with matters of very high antiquity ; and why 

 should he, or what improvement is he likely to gain 

 in his own art by studying what has descended from those 

 dim, primeval times ? 



Truly great may the Greeks, so very generally taken as 

 types of all that is grandly intellectual in antiquity, have 

 been in aesthetic appreciation, or as ethical writers; supreme, 

 too, in that deceptive art, which, in the eyes of more than 

 one of our living statesmen, has elevated Homer to a greater 

 height than all his unrivalled poetry, viz., his "Theotechny;" 

 but who amongst those ancients, whether Pelasgic or Hellenic, 

 had any notion of measuring an angle in the sky with what 

 we should call now even decent accuracy ? 



They are said, those Greek philosophers (and of course in 

 the present enquiry mere Romans are too modern to appear 

 at all), after their civilisation had gone on growing for several 

 centuries, to have ascertained, about the date of 330 B.C., 

 that the then Pole star, some 6° from the Pole, was not in 

 the very Polar point. But as to measuring its distance there- 

 from down to minutes and seconds of angle, that was totally 

 beyond their powers of comprehension, or even their very 

 imagination of the possible. Not that they were necessarily 

 inferior by nature to the men of the present day, in the 

 improvable faculties to be exercised in that science ; but that 

 that science or art, viz., angular measure, does not, and 

 cannot spring into life full and complete at once like a 

 Divine gift, for it is, par excellence, the choicest fruit of 

 man's own progressive development of his own powers 

 through long succeeding ages of steady, undeviating, un- 

 wearied toil. 



