( 385 ) 



XXIX. — A Notice of Recent Measures at the Great Pyramid, and some Deduc- 

 tions flowing therefrom. An Address delivered to the Royal Society, Edinburgh, 

 at the request of the Council, by Professor C. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal 

 for Scotland. (Plates XXVI., XXVIL, and XXVIII.) 



(2d April 1866.)* 



Mr President and Gentlemen, — I beg to thank you for the favourable 

 opportunity which you have kindly afforded, and the facilities you have granted, 

 for enabling me now to try to lay before you some short and simple account of 

 my chief employments last winter at the Great Pyramid of Jeezeh. 



My object in going there, was not to excavate, nor to collect antiquities, but 

 merely to inquire instrumentally, and by my own individual labour, into the very 

 discrepant, and sometimes mutually contradictory, accounts which have been 

 published of the form and detail of that ancient monument by writers of almost 

 all nations ; and as one chief source of their unfortunate variations seems to have 

 been the usually short and hurried character of their visits, my first care was to 

 apply for leave, from His Highness the Viceroy of Egypt, to occupy the ground 

 at the Pyramid with a permanent establishment, and to stay there as long as 

 might be necessary for the work in hand. His Highness, as I am extremely 

 happy to confess, and with the best of my thanks to acknowledge, was most 

 liberal in his condescensions; conveyed our party, at his own expense to the 

 Pyramids ; lent us tents for the period of our stay ; and sent a force of twenty 

 men for a month to clean out the interior of the Great Pyramid, or otherwise 

 prepare its more than classic walls for the examination to be made, and which 

 lasted from that time uninterruptedly for a period of four months. 



Of preliminaries to the instrumental inquiry, I would beg to mention, first of 

 all, — but in a general way only as to the locality, and in reference to the fossils 

 now on the table,— that the hill on which the several Pyramids stand, with much 

 of the Libyan desert behind, or westward of it, is composed of limestone of the 

 earlier tertiary formations, arranged in extensive and massive sheets of tough 

 strata, all of them dipping a few degrees to the south-east, and richly charged 

 with nummulites, echini, and various other fossils. From that stand-point 

 looking northwards, you may see older strata, such as the chalk of the secondary 

 rocks, cropping out on the distant edge of the tableland ; and southwards, you 



* errata. 



Pago 394, lino 2, for measure, read measures. 



395, last line, for This last important element, read This important density element. 

 397, line 26, for it is, read such pound is. 



400, ,, 15, for in ten, read in terms of ten. 



401, „ 4 ah imo, /or been marked, read been passage-marked. 



402, ,, 11, after the Pleiades, insert or their lucida sj Tauri,. 

 402, ,, 22, after than, insert, but equally primeval with,. 



VOL. XXTV. PART II. 5 M 



