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skill of our present engineers, if unaided by the hydraulic 
press, were not those ignorant, imbecile men that modern 
arrogance has delighted to assume. They were men well 
skilled in science, unacquainted with steam, electricity, 
and photography, the discoveries of only the last fifty 
years, but otherwise they were wise for their day ; so 
much so, in fact, that as though well acquainted with the law 
that the present usually discredits the past, and if possible 
destroys or perverts the records of the past, they therefore 
actually engraved upon granite the facts with which they 
were acquainted. Thus scarcely an ancient temple in Egypt, 
Persia, or Greece, but bears upon it the record of the fact 
that the tropics did extend to the poles. In the " Recherches 
sur les Astronomiques des Egyptiens" and in the " Memoire 
sur le Zodiac de Denderah," it is shown that the sculptures 
represent the tropics at the poles of the earth ; a circumstance, 
remarks the seK- sufficient commentator, which " shows 
" how very ignorant these men were, and how very wise 
" we are." 
Again, in that magnificent building, the Temple of the Sun, 
at Palmyra, there is a representation which declares the same 
fact. Plato relates that in the time of Atreus such a change 
did take place. Once, and once only, viz., when the earth 
was traversing a certain part of its orbit, would the sun be 
situated at the prolongation of the axis of the earth, when 
the tropics were at the poles. Thus for a day or so the sun 
would occupy the position which the pole star now does ; and 
to an observer south of Gibeon, the sun would appear over 
Gibeon, and would stand still for about the space of one day. Is 
there no record of this fact ? — (See Joshua, chap, x.) But it 
is useless to multiply evidence. There is no ancient book, 
no ancient sculpture in which the fact is omitted; by 
Herodotus, by Plato, and by many other old writers the 
fact is mentioned. We are not therefore dependent upon our 
c 
