About this edition

This is a complete digital edition of Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid by C. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer-Royal for Scotland: the fourth and much enlarged edition, published in London by Wm. Isbister in 1880. The book is in the public domain.

Source

The text and plates come from the scan of a copy in the library of the School of Theology at Claremont, digitised by the Internet Archive: ourinheritancein0000smyt. Pages 2 and 3 (the motto of Part I and the opening of Chapter I) are missing from that copy and were taken from another copy of the same edition: ourinheritancei00unkngoog.

How the text was made

Every page was read twice and independently by a vision language model (Claude Haiku): once from the page image together with the old OCR layer as a hint, once from a sharper image without it. Wherever the two readings differed in a word, a number or a formula, a third model (Claude Sonnet) compared both against the page image and settled the text. Automatic checks then rendered every formula, recomputed numerical equalities, compared the text against the old OCR layer to catch skipped lines, and matched footnote marks with footnotes.

Each page marker in the text (for example 27) opens the scan of that page, so any passage can be checked against the original.

Differences from the printed book

• The book prints the decimal point raised (365·242). Here it is a normal point: 365.242.
• Calculations are set as formulas; numbers in running text are left as printed.
• Footnotes are numbered within each chapter; the book marks them with *, †, ‡ on each page.
• Words broken across lines are joined; the old space before ; : ! ? is dropped. Spelling, capitals and italics follow the book.
• The plates are cleaned: the paper is lightened and the contrast restored. Nothing in the drawings is altered.