1 87 1.] The Great Pyramid Jn Egypt, 199 



3. Why of that Particular Size. 



If we next inquire why the Great Pyramid was made so 

 truly great as modern measure proves it to be, the ready 

 answer has too often risen up in polite society, from the time 

 of the elder Pliny to our own, — " Because the man who built 

 it was a brute ; he appreciated nothing but big, burly, 

 bullying size, and he tyrannised over his people and drained 

 his country of its resources, merely to make a vulgarly grosser 

 tomb for himself than his neighbours had." 



A very pretty theory, too, is this, as it stands ; but then 

 it does not explain in any degree either the remarkable ab- 

 negation of praise, vain-glorying, and self which was alluded 

 to in Part 1, page 30, or the already proved fact of the re- 

 condite and most meaning angle that was adopted and rules 

 the whole building from bottom to top, and from side to side. 

 Now so important and all-pervading a feature of shape as 

 that, not only cannot be overlooked, but we ought to take 

 it along with us when seeking an explanation of size also. 

 And how shall we consider the size chiefly exemplified ? By 

 one of the four base sides ? Or by one of the four longer 

 diagonal arris lines ? Or by one of the four slanting heights 

 from the middle of a base side up to the apex ? By none of these 

 mutually confusing and competing measures ; but, inas- 

 much as the shape-theory has already attached such impor- 

 tance to the one and only line representing vertical height, 

 and made that to be radius, — why we will take it for size 

 also as a radius ; but a radius of what ? 



Next to land surface for man to dwell on, what is there so im- 

 portant to his physical well-being on earth as sunshine. " The 

 Sun; Ruler, Light, Fire, and Life of the Planetary System," 

 is the well thought out title of Mr. Proctor's recent solar book, 

 and applies most eminently to the earth and man's corporeal 

 existence thereon. So, too, had also considered, before that 

 book was written, my friend W. Petrie, and had convinced 

 himself from other sources as well, that in so anthropolo- 

 gically directed a monument as the Great Pyramid, there 

 should be an expression of the sun's mean distance from 

 the earth as a radius, and that the numbers 10 and 9, or 

 rather 10 and 3 x 3, as he preferred to write it, should 

 play the chief part in the proceeding. Wherefore he took 

 the vertical height of the pyramid as a radius, and multi- 

 plying that by 10 raised to the power of 3 x 3 (i.e., 1 with 

 nine o's after it), got 92,080,000 miles for the result. But he 

 regarded that, at the time, as a failure ; for all his astronomic 

 books told him that the true distance was 95,293,056 miles, 

 and he had in consequence almost thrown the whole thing 



