328 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
When you put on the cover of one of these smaller pyramid 
sarcophagi, the combination of acute-angled grooves and falling 
pins fixes and locks the lid, in a manner most suitable to the safe 
preservation of the contents of a burial sarcophagus or coffin. 
But when you put on, to a true model of the restored coffer of the 
Great Pyramid, any sort of sarcophagus lid prepared suitably to 
its rectangular grooves, — such lid has no fixing power, and can be 
lifted up with the utmost ease ; or in a manner very unsuitable to 
the usual duty of a pure coffin-lid. 
Moreover, such a lid seems most untoward to the coffer in its 
place in the King’s Chamber; because, while the doorway is of 
such a height as only just to allow the coffer to pass through as a 
lidless box, or in the state in which every known historian has 
invariably described it, — put on a lid, prepared in modern times 
according to the proportions of the lids of sarcophagi of that 
period, and you can neither get the vessel into, or out of, the room ; 
by an amount too of 5 or 6 inches of solid granite, for that is the 
space by which the doorway, more than 100 inches thick, is then 
too low to admit the lidded or sarcophagised coffer. 
3. A third subject of my minute examinations of the coffer, con- 
sisted in certain small residual but original errors or defalcations 
in its figure, from a pure geometric form ; and these are generally 
so slight, or are effected by curves of such long radius, as to have 
escaped all my predecessors. 
Yet some gentlemen at home, are not always easy to please. 
And when I supplemented in my printed book some of these addi- 
tional numbers of mine, by a further verbal warning, — intended for 
those who are not yet much experienced in the coffer’s peculiari- 
ties, — the Argus-eyed Proceedings ’ author immediately quotes me, 
at his p. 251, for the warning, or that, if the sides of the coffer 
were calipered lower down than the usual place of measuring, they 
might present a notably different thickness to those who measure 
to two places of decimals of an inch, — and then adds his own 
deep insinuation of blame against me, “though it does not appear 
“ why they were not thus calipered.” 
Pray allow me, Mr Chairman, cheerfully to explain to you why, 
and how, they both were, and were not, calipered. 
They were not actually so calipered, because I could not obtain 
