326 
Proceedings of the Roycd Society 
NUMERICAL POINTS. 
The Goffer. 
What has now been mentioned, is a prevailing characteristic of the 
literary parts of this second Proceedings ’ paper; as readers, who can 
spare the time, will find on tracing up the quotations to the original 
contexts in my books. More quickly provable matters, however, 
are alluded to under the headings dealing more particularly with 
mensuration affairs. Therein, too, although the author begins by 
saying (p. 247), that he approves of the Society having conferred 
the honour of their Keith Medal upon me, for my measures at the 
Great Pyramid, — yet within a couple of pages after that, he attacks 
those measures bitterly, especially as touching the coffer in the 
King’s Chamber ; and he would make them out to be disgraceful, 
rather than creditable. For whereas I had cited, as he implies, 
before going to Egypt, twenty-five different observers, — whose 
measures of the coffer differed irreconcilably, and by monstrous 
differences, — yet when I, a twenty-sixth observer, measured it, 
my observations also differed from every other person’s, were 
apparently no better than any of them, and made a previous con- 
fusion only worse confounded. 
Now my measures did indeed differ from those of every preced- 
ing traveller, in this, — that they were perhaps fifty times more 
numerous. And, by multiplying them over every part of the 
coffer, — I was enabled both to show what were the limits of varia- 
tion in the structure itself ; — and also, to prove that all those older 
recorded measures which differed from certain mean quantities by a 
whole inch, or even half-an-inch (and some of them varied from the 
same in any number of inches from two, four, and upwards to so 
many as forty), were sheer mistakes on the part of the observers : 
some of whom, it should be stated in apology for them, lived far 
back in the 16th century, and had guessed the lengths rather 
than measured them ; not having any idea of the importance of 
extreme accuracy, touching what appeared to them generally, — 
merely as a burial sarcophagus or coffin. 
This important limitation in old asserted differences of the chief 
Irregularities of the Coffer. 
