CHAPTER IV.

THE EARTH-SIZE AND SUN-DISTANCE,

Monumentalized in the Great Pyramid.

Having established thus much, though to a certain degree of approximation only as yet, touching the angular shape, size, and linear standard of the Great Pyramid, it may be worth our while to bestow some special attention on another analogy between that building and the astronomical earth, published by John Taylor; and which, on being examined soon afterwards by Sir John Herschel,¹ was honourably declared by him to be, so far as he then knew, an apparently direct relation, in even and harmonious numbers, between the size of the earth-globe and the size of the Great Pyramid. Of a rather striking kind too, as regarded the cosmical claims of the hypothesis; though at the same time he expressed his belief that it was only approximate.

A most useful caution; and keeping it fully in view, let us test the supposition over again and in terms of those very pyramidal units and standards which we ourselves have now obtained; for inasmuch as they allow us to speak of the Great Pyramid in the actual primal measures apparently employed by its architect in planning the design, we may thereby be enabled to put his work to a stricter test and more immediate proof.

The analogy is, when put into the form subsequently 50chosen by Sir John Herschel, “a band encircling the earth, of the breadth of the base of the Great Pyramid, contains one hundred thousand million square feet.” The built size, in fact, of the Great Pyramid is here stated to bear such a remarkably round and even number, as its proportion to the created size of the natural earth, at and for the epoch of its known and civilized human habitation (for that is a very necessary limitation both of time and circumstance to keep in view, in these days of both geologists and natural philosophers undertaking to discuss periods of many hundreds of millions of years, both past and to come), that an argument for intention rather than accident may spring therefrom, if it hold closely in fact and in sequence to other coincidences independently ascertained.

The feet to be used on such an occasion can hardly be any other than Pyramid feet, or 12 Pyramid inches set in a line; and the part of the earth for the colossal band to encircle, what should that be?

Though it is allowable enough, and very useful too in approximate work, to speak of the earth as a sphere, whose every great circle, or section through its centre, will have the same length of circumference,—we cannot so do, or content ourselves therewith, either in accurate modern science on one side, or in any advanced stage of Pyramid investigation on the other. Especially when some of our earliest discoveries there, indicated that its design successfully discriminated between the axis of rotation diameter, and any and every other possible diameter through the really spheroidal, or ellipsoidal, or chiefly flattened-at-the-poles figure, of the great mass of the earth.

Let us come to some very clear conclusion then on the size and shape of our planet, the earth, in Pyramid units of measure too, before we attempt the solution of any further problem supposed to connect the two.

Of the Length of the Earth’s Polar Axis.

Expressed in Pyramid inches (each of them 0.001 of an inch longer than the national British inch), the polar diameter, or axis of rotation of the earth, has been stated by different observers of the best modern schools of the present time to be either 499,878,000 or 500,060,000 Pyramid inches in length, or any and almost every quantity between those limits. The matter, cannot, in fact, be determined much closer by the best measures of the best men in the present day; and although one nation publishes its own results to an arithmetical refinement of nine places of figures, that is not physical exactness; and it cannot convince any other nation of its correctness beyond the first three places of figures. Some of them may agree to four places, few or none of them to five or six or more places. Therefore, in this case and all other similar ones throughout this book, I shall try to simplify all numerical statements of measures by only entering the significant numbers as far as they can be certainly depended upon. Hence the 000 with which the above statements terminate are merely to give the proper value to the preceding figures, and not to indicate that any one man’s measures of the earth gave forth an even number of inches in units, tens, hundreds, or thousands.

“But why do they not ascertain what the length of the earth’s axis is, and state it exactly?” may ask many a reader, not directly experienced in practical scientific measurement. Well, by all means let any and every such reader ask, and ask again, that question in the proper quarter. Let him ask, for instance, at the Ordnance Survey Office in Southampton, and from the Trigonometrical Survey of India, where generations after generations of Engineer officers have been taken away from their proper military duties, and kept at 52nothing but observations and calculations to get at the size and shape of the earth all their lives long. They have lived and died at that employment alone, and are still succeeded at the task by others, and yet it is not completed. In fact, the expense of the methods and the men employed, is increasing every day. And not in our country alone, but in every state on the Continent, is similar work going on, and with less chance than ever of one exact, absolute, and universally admitted conclusion being ever arrived at.

Neither is this any fault of those individuals; it is the nature of human science, because it is human and not Divine. Human practical science can only go on by approximations, though it work at one and the same simple subject for ages. And though the subject itself in nature and to the eye of its Creator is absolutely simple, human science makes it so complicated and difficult as it advances with its successive inductive approximations and application of more difficult mathematics, that the matter is crushed in the end by its own weight; and at last falls out of the range of all ordinary men to deal with, or even to be interested in.

Not only, too, do the experts of two different countries produce different measured results for the size of one and the same earth’s axis of rotation, but they produce different results in computing the same observations; until even one and the same computer will produce varying quantities out of the same data by different methods of computation and analytical treatment; the absolute correctness of any of which methods he does not pretend to guarantee, though he can say a great deal for them all, in the present advanced state of the science.

Latest Determination of the Earth’s Polar Axis.

A good example of this condition of our best knowledge of the earth’s size was given by a volume 53published by the Ordnance Survey in 1866. It contained some splendid computations by Colonel Clarke, R.E., the chief mathematician of the establishment, and gave perhaps the most highly advanced results of all earth surveys then made by any, and every, nation. Yet he presents his final results in two different shapes, and by one of them makes the polar axis of the earth (reduced here from British into Pyramid inches) to measure by one mode of computation 499,982,000, and by another 500,022,000; leaving the reader to choose which he likes, or any mean between the two.

That publication was, in its day, a most creditable advance upon everything before it; but now, in place of being contented with either one or other or both of those results, all European countries are engaged on further more numerous, more extensive, more tedious, and more costly measurements of the earth; which measurements, after the consumption of more millions of money, may enable the successors of the parties concerned, in the course of the next century or two, to amend the above numbers by some very small fractional part; but whether it will be practically sensible, there is no saying.

In a work entitled “‘The Metric System,” by President Barnard, of Columbia College, New York, 1872, that able analytical mathematician and forcible writer, at pages 94 to 105, sets forth admirably, and in good plain words, the inconceivable practical difficulties which small irregularities in the earth’s figure throw in the way of modern science, ever really determining the size and shape of the whole earth, to any much further degree of plain certainty than it has already arrived at. And, wonderfully extensive, dreadfully expensive too, as have been already the geodesic operations of all nations, taken together, during the last hundred years,—he considers that all their resulting data, expressed by him 54shortly as “40 latitudes,” must eventually be increased to not less than 4,000 such, before the observed materials for computing the earth’s size will be worthily ready for the then mathematicians to begin their unwieldy, unenviable, and humanly almost impossible, discussions of high, future-day science upon; supposing always that the governments of the several countries, and the people of the same, will still be found agreeable to pay for it all.

Equatorial, and other, Diameters of the Earth.

Meanwhile we have already assumed as the polar-axis length for computation in the Pyramid comparisons, 500,000,000 Pyramid inches; and that being a quantity which this recent Ordnance publication may, and to a certain extent does, and must, largely confirm, but cannot overthrow, let us hasten on to an equally close knowledge of what the other diameters of the earth may measure.

These lengths depend partly on what amount of elliptical compression the computers assume, as either $\frac{1}{290}$, $\frac{1}{300}$, or $\frac{1}{310}$, from special measures of it; and partly what shape they assign to the section of the earth at the equator, where a species of transverse elliptical compression is supposed to exist (not absolutely, but only with a certain slightly different degree of probability that it is so, rather than not) by the Ordnance book; but to an extent that may make one of the equatorial diameters 150,000 Pyramid inches longer than another.

Without then attempting to decide any one’s correctness, I have represented these extremes in the accompanying table, and placed between them the very set of earth-measures which I had computed as probably nearest the truth in the first edition of “Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid.”

TABLE OF THE EARTH'S SEVERAL DIAMETERS, IN PYRAMID INCHES.

John Taylor's Analogy tested.

With these data at our command, let us return to the Taylor-Herschel Pyramid analogy, which asserts that “a band of the width of the Great Pyramid's base-breadth encircling the earth, contains 100,000,000,000 square feet.”

An equatorial band is the only one which could encircle the earth in a great circle, and at the same time in one and the same parallel of latitude. We proceed, therefore, thus: from the equatorial diameters given above, we compute the equatorial circumferences by multiplying them by that almost magic number to work calculations with, the $\pi$ of the Great Pyramid and modern mathematics, or 3.14159, &c. Reduce them to Pyramid feet by dividing by 12, and next multiply by the already determined Pyramid base-breadth in Pyramid feet, viz.: $\dfrac{9131.05}{12} = 760.921$; the following results then come out, viz.:—

They all give smaller figures than the required 100,000,000,000; for the smaller equatorial diameter gives 99,919,000,000, and the largest equatorial diameter gives 99,949,000,000.

Not absolutely true, therefore, with any allowable equatorial diameter, further than the first three places. 56An interesting approximation,² therefore, but by its very want of being closer, indicating that there may be something still grander than the size of the earth alone, to be typified by the completer measures of the Great Pyramid, and by viewing them in a different set of relations; just as, when the point of suspension of a steel-yard is changed, and all its indications are immediately multiplied in value.

Grander Pyramid, and Solar, Analogy.

Something then further than earth-size reference had been deemed possible in the Great Pyramid, but was only at last obtained when Mr. William Petrie, C.E., after studying the mensurations detailed in “Life and Work,” in October, 1867, deduced the mean distance of the earth from the sun, or the sun from the earth; in fact “the Sun-distance,” to be the quantity hitherto vaguely expected only. An enormous length of line, even in the heavens, is this sun-distance; and before which the mere size of the earth vanishes into almost nothingness; yet is it a distance from the great centre of light, of heat, and support of all physical, terrestrial life, on which man’s existence eminently depends, on which all his science is intimately based, 57and concerning which it behoves him to know fully as much as it may have pleased the Creator to permit him to learn. The merciful Creator who has further written for our benefit by the Word of Inspiration that “the Lord God is a Sun and Shield” (Psalm lxxxiv. 11); if not also that “The Highest hath placed His Tabernacle in the Sun.”³

Mr. Petrie had remarked, and naturally enough, that the circle typified by the base of the Great Pyramid has already been proved to symbolize a year, or the earth’s annual revolution around the sun; and the radius of that typical circle had also been shown to be the ancient vertical height of the Great Pyramid, the most important and unique line which can be drawn within the whole edifice.

Then that line, said he further, must represent also the radius of the earth’s mean orbit round the sun, however far away that may be; and in the proportion of $10^9$, or 1 to 1,000,000,000; because, amongst other reasons, $10 : 9$ is practically, in one mode of viewing it, the shape of the Great Pyramid. For this building, nothwithstanding, or rather by virtue of, its $\pi$ angle at the sides, has practically and necessarily, and closer than any of the modern scientific measures have come to each other, just such another angle at the corners (see Figs. 1 and 2, in Plate XX.), that for every ten units which its structure advances inward on the diagonal of the base to central, nocturnal darkness, it practically rises upwards, or points to sunshine, daylight and sky, by nine. Nine, too, out of the ten characteristic parts (viz. five angles and five sides), being the number of those ten parts which the sun 58shines on in such a shaped Pyramid, and in such a latitude, at noon, through the greater part of the year; when the sun “sits on the Pyramid with all its rays,” and the building is then said, as it throws no shadow at all, “to devour it.”⁴

The Pyramid Sun-distance.

To computation Mr. Petrie instantly proceeded, reducing the 5,813 Pyramid inches of the Great Pyramid’s height to British inches, multiplying them by $10^9$, and reducing those inches to British miles,—when he worked out the quantity 91,840,000 (nearly) of those miles. Alas! sighed he, the analogy does not hold even in the second place of figures, for the real sun-distance by modern astronomy has been held during the last half-century to be 95,233,055 miles.⁵

So he threw his papers on one side, thinking he had erred altogether in the very conception, and then attended to other matters; until one fine morning he (a professional man then almost wholly and intensely occupied with chemical engineering, besides his own 59serious and exalted religious avocations) chanced to hear, that although the above number, ninety-five millions odd, had been held to for so long by all the modern world,—mainly because it had been produced by the calculations of the then last Venus-transit across the sun's disc, by a late first-rate German astronomer (calculations so vast, so difficult, and with such a prestige of accuracy and power about them, that no living man cared to dispute their results),—yet the astronomical world had been forced to awaken during the last twelve years to a new responsibility, and not only admit that the number might possibly be erroneous, even very erroneous (or actually in the second place of figures), but to institute many series of difficult observations on either side of the world at the same time, for endeavouring to determine what the correction should be.

Some of such observations, too, actually had just then been collected from either hemisphere, and the daily press was full of their new-computed results. And what were they?

Why, one group of astronomers of several nations declared the true mean sun-distance to be about ninety-one to ninety-one and a half millions of miles; and another group of the same and other nations declared it to be from ninety-two and a half to ninety-three millions of miles. And while they were fighting together as to whose results were the better (an actual duel with swords was expected at one time between M. Le Verrier and the late lamented M. De Launay), Mr. Petrie steps in and shows that the Great Pyramid result, which he had formerly allowed to drop from his hands, out of his exceeding respect to all modern science from the beginning of learning up to the year 1855 A.D., is between these two latest, and supposed best, of all the conclusions or so-called determinations; indeed, it is almost exactly the mean between the contending parties, and 60forms therefore in itself, and in all its grand simplicity and antiquity, a single representation of the whole of the numerous, laborious, and most costly sun-distance results of all humankind even up to the present age.*

Granting then that modern science is now, i.e. not in that past day of 1855 or 1860 A.D., but in 1874, 1877, and 1879 A.D., so far advanced that it may talk, at least on a mean of its best results, with some degree of confidence at last of what may not improbably be very near to the true, real, celestial sun-distance,—the practically correct figures for it were given, and built up monumentally, by the Great Pyramid's design, 4,040 years ago; or before any nations of mankind had begun to run their independent, self-willed, theotechnic, and idolatrous courses. And if we desired any additional proof, to the records of the history of science in general, and of the sun-distance problem in particular,⁶ 61that such knowledge could not have been obtained in that early day, when men were few and weak upon the earth, and confined to inhabit an extremely small portion only of its surface,—except their knowledge came from Divine inspiration,—the modern astronomers are now splendidly, though involuntarily, affording it. Giving, indeed, proof heaped on proof, in the enormous, multitudinous, almost ruinously costly preparations which they are making, at the expense of their respective nations, to observe the transit of the planet Venus over the sun's disc: this being merely the most favourable known step for them in their endeavours towards getting the sun-distance number of modern science, a trifle better, perhaps, in the end of 1874.

Modern Astronomers are involuntarily proving that Man, unaided by supernatural Divine Power, could not possibly have measured the Sun-distance accurately in the Age of the Great Pyramid; and yet it is recorded there with exceeding accuracy!

These preparations for observing the next Venus-sun transit by modern astronomers have already (1873) been going on for several years, and nothing of their kind so costly, so scientific, so extensive, was ever seen on the face of the earth before. From Europe to America, and from the most northern nation's old Hyperborean strongholds to the most distant and the newest colonies in the Southern Hemisphere, the busy hum resounds. Steam navigation, iron ships, electric telegraphs, exquisite telescopes, both reflecting and refracting, photographic machines of enormous power, chemicals of wondrous nicety as well as deadly subtlety,

observations of the Abbé La Caille; and only at length reached the full quantity, and then clumsily overpassed it, at the beginning of the present century, under the leadership of German mathematical astronomy. 62refined “regulator” clocks, and still more refined chronographs, transit instruments, equatorials, spectroscopes, polariscopes, altitude-azimuth circles, all these modern inventions and many others, with all the learning of the universities, and numerous officers and men both of the army and navy, are pressed into the cause; preparatory computations, too, with much printing, engraving and publication, have been going on for years: and all will be carried out almost regardless of expense, of time, of danger, of obstacles, to the most distant parts of the earth; and where necessary, to parts, some of them in the tropics, and some in frozen oceans; which neither Greeks nor Romans in all their days, nor even our own fathers only seventy years ago, knew anything of.

But all this accumulated destination of power, of wealth, of numbers, of risk, co-operated in too by every civilized nation, is stated to be absolutely necessary; nothing of it can be spared, nothing omitted, if we are to enrich ourselves, in the present age, with a better result for the sun-distance than mankind was ever informed, much less possessed, of before; excepting always that one grand monumentalization of it laid up in the primeval Great Pyramid; but concerning which no official man seems to be allowed to breathe a word at this time in London society and all the circle of its scientific associations; associations so aristocratic or rather autocratic and even tyrannous in their bearing to the Witness which dates from before history, and yet themselves scarcely more than a century old. So the expeditions will set forth gloriously next year, the favourites of Government and representatives of this boasted nineteenth century. Home astronomical observatories, attending to many other phenomena of the sky, may meanwhile languish and decay, left with only worn-out instruments and superannuated staff to carry 63on their now underrated duties. Nay, indeed, looking to the tax-gathering-from-the-people origination of the funds for all this Venus-transit display, there are financial reformers in the country, only too ready to remark, that while the said expeditions are spending the national wealth upon distant coasts, at home large populations may be starving, public interests be neglected, or delayed indefinitely; and the crimes, as well as calamities, arising out of ignorance uneducated, crowding in squalid residences, cities unsanitary, and the innate wickedness of human nature when left to its own devices uncorrected, will go on wholesale, making our morning papers hideous. But for all that, the happy, chosen parties will sail with their magnificent treasuries of newest instrumental detail; and, if the usual consequences of grand scientific researches, of the more difficult order, follow, the science of the modern world will have occasion to boast, after the affair is over, of having improved its number for expressing the sun-distance—a little; and its acquaintance with certain disturbing phenomena increasing the transcendent difficulty of the observations, and throwing new doubts over the final result—a great deal.

The Great Pyramid before Science.

What a solemn witness to all these unequal efforts of mankind is not the Great Pyramid, which has seen all human actions from the beginning; from the time when men broke away in opposition to both the Divine rule and inspired teachings of patriarchal life, and wilfully went after their own inventions!

Placed in the midst among all men, and especially those of the earliest inhabited regions of the post-diluvial earth, thus has been standing the Great Pyramid from Dispersion times; and they, the men so 64honoured, never knowing anything of its knowledge capacity, or suspecting its profound meaning. Yet these things, or the types and measures of many of them, so far as we have seen them here, were on its surface all the time. Any one, therefore, through all history, who should have known, if he could have known indeed, the true sun-distance, had only to compare the Great Pyramid's height therewith, reasoning at the same time on its shape, in order to be enabled to perceive that the measure of that all-important physical, astronomical, metrological, and anthropological quantity was nailed up there from ancient days; and in figures more exact than any that modern observations have done more than merely approximate to as yet.

In this grand earth and sun symbology, too, the Great Pyramid is not only more favourably circumstanced than all the other Pyramids of Egypt,—but none of them can pretend to have any place in the question. To be privileged even to enter the lists, two data of monumental possession are necessary. One, is the $\pi$ shape, to give both the $10^9$ proportion and the radius to circumference of circle relation. The other, an absolute amount of vertical height, which, in the case of the Great Pyramid, is by no one now assumed as less than 5,808, or more than 5,832, and believed to be most close to 5,819, British inches.

Now, as to the $\pi$ shape, it has already been shown, in Chapter II., that not only none of the other Pyramids of all Egypt have that, but they persist in keeping to other shapes.

While as to their vertical heights, these are all far too small; the highest amongst them (as determined by Colonel Howard-Vyse and Mr. Perring) having measured in their complete ancient condition, as follows and no more:—

and at last, as see Plates IV. and V.,

Nor has any stone building whatever been erected in any age, even up to this present hour, high enough to compete with the Great Pyramid's glory in this one particular. (See Plate I., the Frontispiece, representing all the buildings of the world, in time and in height.)

But again we shall have to tell, and from facts ascertained and ascertainable in just as eminently practical a manner, that all that wonderful scientific information (more than wonderful for the age and circumstances under which it was placed there) was not introduced into the Great Pyramid for strengthening men in science; much less was it to promote the worldly fame of the introducer.

Science is there, but almost solely, as it would now seem, to prove to these latter scientific days of the earth, that the building so designed in the beginning of the Noachian world, when human science was not, has now a right, a title, an authority, to speak to men of these times, and even to the most scientific of them, on another and far higher subject; or of things unseen, yet quick and powerful, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Postscript in 1877 A.D.

So far was written in 1873. The Venus-Transit therein alluded to, came off most successfully as to innumerable observations and multitudes of photographs 66of it being taken in December, 1874; and what is the result now, in February, 1877, on the world’s present knowledge, by modern science, of the sun’s true distance from the earth?

Nothing! Yes, indeed, with one solitary exception, presently to be alluded to, nothing! And yet rooms full of computers have been working away ever since at the necessary computations; but the further they go, the more unexpected difficulties they find. The optical phenomena connected with the physical nature of the sun’s disc, and the disc of the planet, offer a host of difficulties. Photography, too, it was expected was going to be of so much facile, and even hasty, assistance, and yet the British Journal of Photography, of February 9, 1877, contains the following:—

‘‘It is stated on good authority that the measurements of the photographs of the Venus-transit—those for instance taken by the French parties—are not progressing favourably. More than 1,000 plates are to be investigated microscopically, and at the present moment only forty-seven have been disposed of. Unforeseen difficulties are said to have arisen.”

Some of these may be guessed at, from the notices at page 182 of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Anniversary Report of February, 1877, wherein it is mentioned that in the special calculations to get the means for correcting the distortion of the photographs at certain of the stations, no less than 2,800 pages of ordinary foolscap size have been closely covered with figures. One skilful measurer of the distorted photographs, kept at his task for seven months, made no less than 38,000 microscopic measures, and then his eyesight failed. Three hundred other British pictures have still to be measured in this distressing manner, and the corrections for distortion at five of their stations have still to be investigated.

67Then the Tables of the Moon, after 200 years of observations of that luminary at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich,—are not yet accurate enough for the Longitudes of the Venus-Transit Stations; and finally, the earth itself is accused of no longer rotating with the full amount of equability expected by theory.

In short, those who hold the observational documents, and the powers of place, will not at present give out anything in the way of the new sun-distance number; nor say when their results will be ready,.nor what they will cost the nation by the time they are published.

Under these circumstances it is almost needless to refer to the little, though honourable, exception mentioned above; and to relate how a notable member of the French Academy of Sciences has by his own means alone, computed some of the observations of two of the French Venus-Transit Stations, viz. Pekin, and the Island of St. Paul in the Indian Ocean; and having from them deduced a sun-distance number, this has been declared by Monsieur l'Abbé and Chanoine Moigno, in his scientific journal Les Mondes, to be almost identical with the ancient sun-distance of the Great Pyramid.

It is useless to make anything of this just now; because the holders-back of the store-houses full of observations from all the stations, are ready at any moment to overwhelm M. Puiseux, and declare that his one result is not to be taken as the result of the whole world of science at the Venus-Transit of December, 1874. They, the holders-back of what is wanted to be known, are the only authoritative sources of information to be looked to; and they are, in some instances at least, more occupied "in giving honour one to another," than in working disinterestedly and unselfishly at the required computations: for this is what we read at page 344 of the journal Nature, February 15, 1877:—

68“A medal to commemorate the part taken by the Institute of France in the observation of the transit of Venus has been struck at the National Mint. It bears the representation (rather too commemorative also of the profane and indecent classic idolatries) of a female (in the utmost state of nudity) passing close before the car of Apollo (who appears much surprised, and not particularly pleased, thereat), with the motto in Latin, Quo distant spatio, sidera juncta docent. Each member of the Institute has received a silver medal, as well as the heads of the mission; the assistants received a bronze one. A medal has been cast in gold and presented to M. Dumas, the president of the Transit Commission. The expenses were defrayed by subscriptions among the members of the Institute.”

The position therefore, for sun-distance information, is rather this. The Venus-Transit alluded to has taken place. More money has been spent upon it than was spent on all the previous sun-distance measurings from the foundation of the world, put together; and still, more than two years afterwards, the world’s knowledge of the sun-distance is defective in the second place of figures. How many more millions of money and thousands of years will it therefore take for modern science and all its votaries to reach an accuracy in the items of, say, five or six, places of figures?

And yet far more than that will be required, if the collective science of mankind is ever to answer, with regard to the sun-distance, that other and further question put so pointedly by the Almighty himself to Job (xxxviii. 18), touching merely the Earth-size,—

“‘Hast thou perceived the breadth of the Earth? Declare if thou knowest it all.”

Further Postscript in 1879 A.D.

“Oh! as for that,” says modern science, “give my adepts time and money enough, and they’ll not only do 69all that, but much more too. Education, continued uninterruptedly, can raise man up to any efficiency whatever."

But are you sure that the prescribed time for man and his independent trial on earth has not now almost run out? See what a downward turn, at least all these special Venus-Transit affairs, that were to have eclipsed the Great Pyramid sun-distance entirely, have been taking, even since our last report, as thus:—

1st. The Astronomer-Royal (at Greenwich) was called on, by the Admiralty, impatient of further years of delay, to report, for the information of Parliament, what he and all his splendidly appointed Venus-Transit parties of three years previous, made their new sun-distance? He reported accordingly, but on their optical measures only, and said the distance was 93 millions and some hundreds of thousands of miles.

2nd. On these papers reaching the Cape of Good Hope, they were overhauled by the Astronomer there, declared to have been erroneously computed on some points, and the true result stated to be 91 millions and some hundreds of thousands of miles.

3rd. On that criticism returning to Greenwich, the Cape Astronomer was vehemently accused. But, on going over their own work again, the home parties found it expedient to alter their previously reported result, and in the same direction, though not to the full quantity, indicated to them from South Africa.

4th. In the spring of 1877 the Astronomer-Royal announced that a better plan for modern science to determine the sun-distance by, than any Venus-Transit, was an opposition of the Planet Mars, if observed that year, and in a particular manner at a station near the Equator. An expedition was accordingly sent out; no 70less than 14 fixed observatories in Europe, America and Australia were engaged to co-operate with it; the desired observations were made, but the result, though indicated, is neither yet finally declared, nor apparently much cared, or waited for now, by anyone.

5th. In June, 1878, the photographic results of the Venus-Transit at the British stations in 1874, were reported to the Royal Astronomical Society, London; but found to be so bad, some of them inferring the solar-distance to be even greater than infinity, that they were almost hooted at by everyone.

6th. Meanwhile the greater part of the French, and all the German, Italian, American and Russian observations of 1874, are still hanging fire as to what their respective values of the sun-distance are to be. Indeed, the parties there concerned are beginning to say, that they do not intend to give out anything, until they shall also have observed and computed the next Venus-Transit which is to occur in 1882. And,

Finally, so far as the British work is concerned, by a Report of the Astronomer-Royal in February, 1879,⁸ it appears that H.M. Government, pressed on all sides by the bad commercial times, extensive strikes of workmen all over the country, desertions of soldiers, bursting of naval guns, colonial disasters, wars and threatenings of wars in three parts of the globe at once, have stopped any further supplies to Venus-Transit work. Wherefore the said Astronomer-Royal is left, with only one captain out of all his late naval and military expeditional staff, to finish off those once o'ervaulting, now unfortunate calculations, and get them printed where or how he can.

Still, therefore, the Great Pyramid stands, very much as it did before the late Venus-Transit expeditions, in 71all the strength of the human power of the nineteenth century, arose,—with its own primeval sun-distance undisturbed; a silent, but solemn, witness among men of something more than mere natural history development having occurred at the building operations on the Jeezeh hill, in the early ages of mankind.