200 The Great Pyramid in 'Egypt. [April, 



overboard, when he heard accidentally one day that 

 within the last ten years, astronomers have entirely 

 quitted their former trust in 95 millions and so many 

 odd miles (though they publicly crowned with exceeding 

 honour the German astronomer and computer who 

 brought it out for them), and are now close upon 

 92 millions instead, but with no very great certainty 

 either. In fact, at this moment the astronomical world has 

 split into two opposite camps, one of which, championed 

 chiefly by foreign astronomers, makes the true solar distance 

 very sensibly greater than the other, though both of them 

 much less than the old 95 millions. Each party is perfectly 

 certain that they are right and the others wrong, and in 

 their eagerness to demolish their opponents, overlook the 

 remarkable fact that the pyramid sun-distance comes between 

 litem ; for even with all its ""present needless amount of 

 probable error as depending on the bad measures for the 

 pyramid's size taken by modern science, both limits of this 

 anciently defined quantity come into the vacant space 

 between the presently opposing parties in practical and 

 physical astronomy. They fight ; but until one of them has 

 entirely annihilated the other, the friends of the pyramid 

 may look on perfectly unmoved. 



If, then, the vertical height of the Great Pyramid was 

 really regulated so as to be a certain round fraction of 

 the sun's mean distance from the earth, we need not expect 

 any other cosmical quantities to be expressed by the size of 

 other features such as the slant height, arris line, &c, &c. ; 

 for they can only be necessary mathematical accompaniments 

 of the settled vertical height in a ir pyramid. But if we 

 introduce a new idea, or unit of measure, something may 

 come of it, especially if We have pyramid authority for 

 such additional unit. 



Now, in the northern hemisphere of the earth, the semi- 

 axis of rotation stands up in the midst of the circle of the 

 equator, something after the fashion of the pyramid's 

 vertical height to its square base with the circular propor- 

 tion. Let us take the length, then, of that semi-axis as 

 determined by modern science and divide it by 10 raised to 

 the 7th power, — that number being chosen partly because 

 seven is one of the extra numbers peculiarly given to the 

 Great Pyramid by means of its it proportion, and partly, and 

 still more pointedly, because the length so obtained, or 

 25*025 British inches is, in the first place, signally within 

 the limits which Sir Isaac Newton settled a century and a 



