CHAPTER XV.

HEAT AND PRESSURE, ANGLE AND TIME,

Cosmical and Pyramidal.

As already shown, no system of weights and measures can be complete without a reference to heat, and its power of altering the dimensions of all bodies. It would appear too, that, next to the very existence of matter, heat is the most important influence or condition in creation; and, since the rise of the modern science of thermo-dynamics, which looks on heat as a mode of motion, the measure of heat is the first step from statics to dynamics, which is the last and truest form of all science.

Thermometers and their Scales in different Countries.

A “thermometer” is therefore, in these days, one of the most widely essential of all scientific instruments, and there is probably no modern science which can advance far without its aid; unless indeed such science be assisted by some semi-natural and practical method of securing one constant reference temperature for all its observations; but which is seldom possible to be carried out completely in any modern observatories; and in fact is not. Yet the thermometer in England, though there so doubly necessary, both in, and out of doors, has been allowed to remain, as to its scale, in a most haphazard sort of guise. That is, the said scale is 306actually ridiculed over the chief part of continental Europe, as being both inconvenient in practice, and founded in error too: in so far as the primitive notion of Mynheer Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit,¹ touching absolute cold, is seen every winter to be a mistake, whenever his thermometer descends below its own carefully marked zero; while the all-important point of the freezing of water is left at the not very signal, but certainly rather inconvenient, number of 32°; and the boiling-point at the not more convenient one of 212°.

Many, therefore, have been the demands that we should adopt either the German Réaumur, or the French Centigrade, i.e. originally the thermometer of Celsius; in terms of any of which, water-freezing marks 0°; and all degrees below that notable point are negative; above, positive.

The proposed change has, except in a few chemical circles, been strenuously resisted, because—

1st. The anomalous absolute numbers chosen for freezing and boiling on Fahrenheit's scale do not interfere with the accuracy of thermometers so marked, when due allowance is made for them.

2nd. It has been against the principle of most British scientific men hitherto, in their different weights and measures, to have them showing a natural standard in themselves; but only to have their proportion to the 307said natural standards numerically determined, and then recorded in writing elsewhere.

3rd. This system has been carried out in its integrity in Fahrenheit's thermometer when it is written, that 180 even subdivisions shall exist between freezing and boiling; and the commencing number for freezing shall be 32°.

4th. In the fact that the distance between freezing and boiling is divided into 180 parts in Fahrenheit's thermometer, but only 100 in the French thermometer, and 80 in the German instrument, eminent advantage is claimed for every-day purposes; even among the chemists too, as well as all other members of the community,—because a greater number of different states of temperature can be quoted in even degrees without reference to fractions of a degree; and—

5th. It is said that the proposed change would be subversive of all ordinary ideas of steady-going individuals as to what the new numbers really meant; because, what honest country gentleman would appreciate in his heart that a temperature of 40°, when a French system should be established amongst us, meant an overpowering, exhausting summer heat of 104° Fahrenheit?

Some of these objections have weight, but others are of doubtful importance; and in all that can be said about the British scientific principle (as established by recent Governments) not founding its measures on natural standards direct,—that is proved to be baseless for our nation's early, and more than historic, origin,—by reason of the real British length unit, the inch, having been found, after all, to be an even, round fraction of the earth's semi-axis of rotation; and the Great Pyramid building bearing witness, that the matter was by no means accidental, but grandly in earnest intention.

The ultra-scientific upholders too of Fahrenheit, have, 308in the instance of the best practical zero of temperature, received a notable correction from the poorer classes of our land; the very classes for whom alone all working measures should be primarily arranged; seeing that every gardener, and probably every ploughman who thinks of such things at all, is accustomed in his daily toil to speak of the more rurally important and biologically trying cases of temperature (as well as the physically marvellous one of the universal fluid becoming a solid, and hardening both earth and water), not in terms of alien, and over-lauded, Mr. Fahrenheit’s scale by any means, but as so many “ degrees of frost ” or ‘heat.’

The practical importance, therefore, of having the British thermometrical zero at the freezing-point of water, is thus incontestably proved, and from the right direction; while, if it be desirable, as no doubt it is, to have the space from freezing to boiling divided into a greater number of degrees than either the French or German systems offer,—why then, let the nation take for the space between the two natural water units, not even the 180 of the clever Amsterdam Dutchman, Fahrenheit, or rather of Olaus Roemer, the Danish Astronomer, but the 250 of the Great Pyramid scale; for by so doing, not only will they reap that one advantage above mentioned to a still greater extent, but they will suffer less shock, as it were, in their feelings, when talking of summer temperatures, than even if they retained the size of the Fahrenheit degrees, but placed the o at freezing; as simply illustrated by the following numbers, giving the same absolute temperatures in terms of five different thermometric scales :—

309But now for the finishing off of this last temperature scale, in the manner in which the Pyramid system so often ends with reference to the four sides of its base, and to the first four simple sections of such a Pyramid. Multiply, therefore, the 250° of water-boiling by 4, making 1,000, and where are we landed?

At that most notable and dividing line of heat, where it causes bodies to begin to give out light; and registered with confidence by the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Society, in Vol. II. of their “Natural Philosophy,” p. 63, under title of “Iron Bright Red in the Dark,” as being 752° Fahrenheit, which amounts to 1,000° of the Pyramid precisely. And multiply this 1,000° again by 5, and where are we? At 5,000° of the Pyramid, or that glowing white-hot heat, where the modern chemists of several nations would place the melting-point of the most dense and refractory of all metals, platinum. Or descend again to −400° Pyramid, and we find a point regarded by some existing chemists as the absolute zero of temperature: though natural philosophers are more inclined to prefer their theoretical base of the air thermometer at −682° Pyramid; but as none of them have yet approached nearer than about half-way thereto, no man among them knows what physical obstacles may lie in the still long and entirely untried portion of their path. And that there may be many such difficulties, we have not to look far for an example.

French Academicians of the first Revolution despise the interests of the people in their temperature standard; and are met by unexpected difficulties.

Thus the French metrical temperature reference was originally intended by its exceedingly scientific authors, admirable for their day, to have been the freezing-point 310of water; on the arithmetical and mathematical, rather than physical and experimental, conclusion—that they would find water in its densest condition when coldest, or immediately before passing into the state of ice. But lo! when they began to experiment, nature refused to be bound by human ideas, and water was discovered to be of the greatest density at a very sensible distance of heat above freezing, or at 39°·2 Fahr.

When this discovery was once made, able men found in it a most beneficent influence to promote the amenities of human life upon the surface of the earth; seeing that but for the anomalous expansion of water with cold, when the temperature descends below 39°·2 Fahr., our lakes and rivers would freeze at the bottom instead of the top; and would, in fact, accumulate beds of ice below, until in the winter they became entirely solid blocks; which blocks no summer sun would be able to do more than melt a small portion of the surface of, to be inevitably frozen hard again the next cold night, to the destruction of all the fish.

The discovered fact, however, of what really does take place, when water approaches the freezing-point, had the inconvenience of utterly breaking up the uniformity of the Academy's arrangements for temperature reference in the French metrical system. For the Parisian philosophers still desired to refer some observations to freezing; yet could not but conscientiously admit the superior propriety, at least for all measurements wherein the density of water entered, of employing their newly corrected temperature of 39°·2 Fahr., rather than their former 32° Fahr.

Accordingly, at page 21 of Roscoe's "Lessons in Chemistry," where the best possible face is put upon employing French measures for the British nation, we are told that the French unit of weight is a cubic centimètre of water at a temperature of 4° Centigrade. But 311at page 147, a table-of specific gravities is given, where it is stated that water at the temperature of 0° Centigrade is to be taken as unity; and no temperature reference at all appears for length measure; perhaps because the author knew that that reference is just now, for the mètre of the Archives, a still further deviation from the originally intended uniformity; being actually an uncertain quantity somewhere between 6° and 12° C., on account of an error in the mètre's length.

Again, at pages 361 and 362 of Prof. Roscoe's handy little book; extensive tables are formally given of comparisons between the English and French measures of all kinds (descending, where weight is concerned, to the sixth place of decimals of a grain), but no mention at all is made either of temperature or atmospheric pressure for any of them; though the former condition must vary between the two systems occasionally by 60°, and the latter by the extent of the whole atmosphere.

In fact, the too learnedly artificial character of the French temperature and pressure references is such, that they cannot, in practice, look the light of day in the face; while they are, above all things, and for other reasons as well, totally unsuitable to the working-man. You cannot, for instance, attempt or pretend to use them in practice, without breaking their most important provisions continually; as well as introducing huge errors, such as the omission or introduction of the whole atmosphere, and all for the purpose of guarding against mere microscopic errors depending on minute and almost totally insensible variations of the atmosphere as it exists about, and is breathed momentarily by, all mankind.

On that unhappy doctrinaire French system, strictly carried out, if there should arise a difference of opinion at a market, as to which is the longer of two measuring-rods, or which is the heavier of two weights, you must 312carry both of them away from what they were being employed for, and bring the rods down by any possible refrigerating method to the 6° or 12° C. point, and place the weights by some difficult and expensive contrivance in a vacuum, and also at a temperature of o° C., or perhaps 4° C. All these being out-of-the-way conditions where no one, except an occasional savant, ever wants to use either rods or weights; and where you may find that their relations to each other (from different rates and characters of heat expansibility) are actually and totally different from what they were at any of the degrees of natural temperature, wherein they are being every day really and practically employed by the mass of the people; and which degrees never differ much from their mean quantity all the year through.

Nature's Standards of Temperature and Pressure, for all men.

Indeed the extreme narrowness of the range both of temperature and atmospheric pressure, within which all the best, and the most too, of human work is performed, has begun at last to excite intelligent and interested attention. Wherefore thus, an able and scientific American observer, field-geologist, and eloquent author, Mr. Clarence King, leaving everyone to find out for themselves, if they have not done so already long ago, that they cannot write neatly with frozen fingers, holds forth, in his recent book entitled “Mountaineering in Sierra Nevada,” California,—on the importance to man of a certain standard degree of pressure of the atmosphere; when he, Mr. King, has descended again to the inhabited and low plain country, after a long sojourn on duty upon the high and snowy flanks of the upper parts of Mount Shasta:—

313“The heavier air of this lower level soothed us into a pleasant (laziness) (frame of mind) which lasted over Sunday, resting our strained muscles and opening the heart anew to human and sacred influence. If we are sometimes at pain when realising within what narrow range of latitude (temperature) mankind reaches finer development,—or how short a step it is, from tropical absence of spiritual life to dull boreal stupidity,—it is added humiliation to experience our still more marked limitation in altitude. At fourteen thousand feet, or with 17 only, in place of 30, inches of atmospheric pressure, little is left me but bodily appetite and impression of sense. The habit of scientific observation, which in time becomes one of the involuntary processes, goes on as do heart-beat and breathing; a certain general awe overshadows the mind; but on descending again to lowlands, one after another the whole riches of the human organization come back with delicious freshness.”

By what blinded impulse then could it have been, that the philosophers of Paris did not accept their position on the earth, under, or in, the atmosphere, as given them by God to breathe, and to flourish in. And they know that they cannot do without it. Yet have they in spirit rebelled, and instead of making the delightful mean annual temperature and wholesome and necessary mean annual pressure of the atmosphere on and in their abodes, the standard references for those features in all matters of their country’s metrology,—they must rush off to a horribly chilling, an actually freezing, benumbing zero; to a theoretical absence of all vital atmosphere, which would, in fact, be instant death to the bravest amongst them; and to a host of smaller physical difficulties which they have not even yet overcome or got out of the maze of.

Or by what mere flock-of-sheep idea of irrationally 314following some leader, is it, that now, so many of our British scientific men,—after having made their own barometrical observations at temperatures between 50° and 80° indoors, and having received others from abroad also confined within the same pleasing limits of temperature, and knowing that the Russians reduce all their extensive barometric observations to 62° Fahrenheit, can think of no other mode of bringing them all to one common temperature point of comparison, than by carrying every one of them right away, as the French metrical men do, to the distant and outlandish and horrible freezing-point. Though too they have to apply for that purpose so large a correction to the numbers read off from each barometer, that the original observer fails to recognize, in his computed observations, those standard heights of quicksilver which he used to identify in his daily experience with particular conditions of weather, or warnings of approaching storms? Yet the London Government and the British people are daily paying, by the counsel of certain of their unpatriotic scientists, and metropolitan scientific Societies, of Gallic proclivities, for this extravagant correction being applied to innumerable British meteorological observations.

The Great Pyramid's Zone of 30° Latitude, and its bearing on the same Earth-Atmosphere Standards.

But all these anomalies are corrected at once at the Great Pyramid; for its position on the earth's surface in that parallel of latitude (30°) which, by the geometry of a sphere, has an equal amount of terrestrial surface between itself and the equator on one side, and itself and the Pole on the other, evidently points to something like mean terrestrial surface temperature as the proper central point of comparison in the affairs of men. 315Equally too does the Pyramid point to 30 of its inches of mercurial pressure of the atmosphere, as the international reference in that department of Nature. Exhibiting the quantity also as the very clear and distinctly separating line between good, and bad, of the weather all the world over; above 30 inches of the barometer meaning dry weather, sun-shine, and bracing Polar air; below 30 inches, rain, clouds, moisture, and electric equatorial gales; while the French metricalists can only say, that the same grand bounding line, or pathway between the serene and the stormy, of terrestrial meteorology is marked amongst them, by the indistinct number of 761.99 millimètres.

The Pyramid reference indeed for pressure would not be exact, if observed very scientifically and microscopically in its own latitude and longitude at the sea-level. But that needlessly low-down reduction of all meteorologists, is only another case of their going on one side, instead of to the middle, of the fact; for the bulk of mankind does not live at that most dangerous level, when every gale might submerge whole cities and drown the inhabitants by myriads of myriads,—but much more nearly at such a mean, and perfectly safe height above it, as that of the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, viz. 4,297 inches. A height which both gives out, on an annual mean of barometric observations, the required 30 inches; and at the same time makes the temperature observed there, under normal circumstances, the true Pyramidal $\frac{1}{5}$ between boiling and freezing of water; and not the slightly higher temperature of that latitude and longitude, if reduced to what does not exist there the sea-shore and its level.

The said King’s Chamber temperature of $\frac{1}{5}$, is further the mean-temperature (and therefore the proper reference point for all men) of the whole anthropological earth. Not of the whole earth simply, for that includes frozen 316Polar lands in either hemispheres of such excessively low temperature that they are not, and cannot, and never will be, permanently occupied by man. Lands too, which with their six-months’ Arctic nights ignore the Great Pyramid’s very first and foundational teaching, or of 365.242 solar days and nights as numbering the length of the year, and defining the diurnal circumstances under which human labour is to be performed and human rest enjoyed, until the time for setting down in the Kingdom of God. Lands, moreover, as those so often sunless Polar ones, which in their perpetual cold, and “whitening in eternal sleet,” may represent that Divinely implied impossibility to Job,—

“Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?
Or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail,
Which I have reserved against the time of trouble,
Against the day of battle and war?” (Job xxxviii. 22, 23.) ²

And on making such very proper Polar exception in our earth-surface enquiry, the mean temperature of all man-inhabited countries does again appear to be, just that very same beneficent and most suitable quantity of the Great Pyramid generally, and of the King’s Chamber thereof more particularly,—viz. $\frac{1}{5}$, or in the special number of that Chamber itself, 50; here to be called 50 degrees of temperature.

Hence we seem now to be Pyramidically justified in giving out, as almost cosmical in their bearings, in the following general table (reduced or translated from various modern sources), the numbers which would be read off for the phenomena there alluded to, upon any well-graduated Pyramid thermometer to be.

TEMPERATURES IN PYRAMID THERMOMETER DEGREES.

Atmospheric pressure = 30 inches, except when otherwise stated.

Angle.

No sooner has man in the course of his scientific development begun to contemplate the skies, than he feels the necessity of having angular, as well as, or even rather than, linear, measure to refer to for distances; and the same demand for angular measure is soon afterwards experienced in each of the purely terrestrial sciences as well.

Therefore it was, that the French savants of the Revolution attempted to introduce into their decimally arranged metrical system an angular graduation where the quadrant contained 100, and the whole circle 400, degrees. But, after trying it for some years, they had to give it up; for the influence of “Great Babylon,” which is, by some persons, believed to have originally invented, and then fixed on the world, our present sexagesimal system, or 360° to the circle, and 60 minutes to the degree, was too powerful for modern Paris to contend successfully against.

But there could have been no more community in ancient days of feeling or idea between most idolatrous Babylon, and the totally non-idolatrous Great Pyramid in their goniometry, than in their methods of astronomical orientation, which we have already seen were entirely diverse. What system, then, for angle was more probably employed at the Great Pyramid?

A system apparently of 1,000° to the circle; 250° to the quadrant.

This conclusion has been ventured to be deduced from the following features at the Pyramid:—

(1.) The angle of rise of the Pyramid's flanks, and the angle of descent or ascent of its passages, are both very peculiar angles, characteristic of the Great Pyramid; and though rough and incommensurable on either 319the Babylonian, or French, or any known angular system, are in a practical way evenly commensurable on the Pyramid system.

SYSTEM OF ANGLE MEASURES.

(2.) Whereas the King’s Chamber has been in a manner utilised as the chamber of the standard of 50, and the Queen’s as that of the standard of 25, and are both of them witnessed to by the number of the Pyramid courses on which they stand, the subterranean chamber may be considered the chamber of angular measure; and does,³ at its centre, view the whole Pyramid side, at an angle of 75° 15′ 1″ Babylonian, but 209°.03 Pyramid. And though there are now only 202, there are shown to have been in the original finished Pyramid somewhere between 208 and 212 complete masonry courses; or agreeing, within the limits of error of those researches, with the angular result of 209°.

(3.) And then there follows a useful practical result to Navigation, and its peculiar itinerary measure, the “knot,” or nautical, or sea mile; viz. the length of a mean minute of a degree of latitude.

At present there is much inconvenience from the large difference in length between our land and sea miles; for they measure 63,360 and 72,984 inches respectively.

320But, granted that a Pyramid knot shall be 1-25th part of a Pyramid degree,—then the respective lengths of a Pyramid land, and a Pyramid sea, mile will be the comparatively approaching quantities, in inches, of 62,500′ and 62,995′.

Money.

The French metrical system included money; and its francs, issued accordingly, have deluged the world to such an extent, that when a prize was recently proposed to all nations by the Queen of Great Britain for a certain artistic manufacture, viz. a fan, to be competed for at the South Kensington Museum of Science and Art, the money value of that prize was, by the advice of some most unpatriotic officers of that magnificently supported British Government Institution, publicly advertised in London in “francs.”

Wherefore many inquirers have demanded, “What about money on the Pyramid system also?”

I can only answer them, that I have not been able to find out anything about that subject in the Great Pyramid.

And is that to be wondered at? Only look at any piece of money whatever: whose image and superscription does it bear? That of some earthly Cæsar or other. Therefore is money of vain human inventions, and of things speedily passing away. But all the Great Pyramid measures hitherto investigated, being evenly commensurable in every case, either with the deep things of this planet world, or the high things of heaven above, are to be considered as virtually impressed rather with a typical effigy of some of the attributes of the creation of God; in praise moreover and honour of God alone.

Far be it from me, however, to circumscribe by my 321small knowledge, the bearings of any part of the Great Pyramid system. And, just as several other portions thereof have yielded fuller returns and more definite answers on taking into account the experiences of the Anglo-Saxon population of the United States of America,—so here, there is something further to be learned.

The coinage of that grand family of Republics is the only example of the money of a truly great people without the effigy of a Cæsar: and is also the only one known which bears certain internal numerical relations to the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, when the dimensions of that chamber are expressed in British inches.

This astonishing coincidence has but recently been recognized and given to the world, by the acute Dr. Watson F. Quinby, of Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., and has been expressed by him nearly in these words:—

“Our (U.S.) silver coinage corresponds in grains to the measures of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, in British inches. So that the length of that chamber being 412.5 of those inches, the standard weight of the “Dollar of the Fathers” is 412.5 grains; the half-dollar, weighing 206.2 grains represents the breadth of the same chamber = 206.25 British inches; and the quarter-dollar of 103.1 grains represents in inches the half breadth of the same chamber, or the ‘touch-stone’ length as it has been called of so many of the Great Pyramid's measurements.

“At the same time the grander golden coin, the American Eagle, contains 232.5 grains of pure gold, or the number of Pyramid Cubits in the vertical height of the Great Pyramid; and the ‘half-eagle’ contains 116.25 of the same gold in grains, equal almost exactly to the length of the Antechamber of the King's Chamber in the same Pyramid expressed in Pyramid inches.”

Time.

Time is an admitted subject in every good system of metrology; and yet is it an absolute imponderable; one, too, of which, says the moralist, we take no account but by its loss. And if this be true, how all-important for us to know “how much there is of it”; and more especially how much still remains, of that finite section already told off by the Eternal, to witness the present manner of dominion, perhaps trial, of men upon the earth!

Hitherto, these questions have been utterly above unaided man’s intellect; and though the metaphysicians, following up their verbal disquisitions on the infinity of space, desire to make out also an absolutely infinite extension of time, and that both for time past and time to come,—the researches of the scientists are more to our purpose, for they dwell rather upon the unlimited divisibility of time. Divide it, for instance, into ever such minute portions, and it is time still; and not like the chemical elements of matter, which, after a certain amount of subdivision, exhibit, to the mathematician, their component atoms with totally different properties from what are possessed by larger portions of the same substances.

But whether time be long or short, and past, future, or even present, the human senses, unassisted by reference to the material world, are far more liable to error in this than in any other branch of all metrology. To some men, time slips away almost unheeded, unimproved too, until the end of life itself be reached; while with others, time is regarded as the most precious of all the usable gifts of God to men. With time and plenty of it, what splendid achievements may be realised; and into a short time, how much can be packed away! While the involuntary action of our thinking system, even 323exceeds the utmost straining of our voluntary efforts in matters of time; so that a single second between sleeping and waking has enabled a man to pass, without desiring it, through the multitudinous experiences of a long and eventful life.

On one side, again, in the study of time, the Natural History sciences give us the sober biological warning, that man, as he exists now, in materially uninterfered-with possession of the earth, is not going to last for ever; for there is a settled length of time for the whole duration of a species, as well as the single life of an individual therein. But on the other side, the too exclusive study of certain of these very sciences has led their out-and-out votaries, in late years, to talk more flippantly of time than of anything else under the sun. A few hundred thousand millions of years accordingly are at one instant created, and at another destroyed, or at another still totally disregarded by some of these gentlemen, just as their theories of the hour prompt them: and it is only the astronomer who stands up in rigid loyalty to this real creation by God alone, and tells mankind that time is one only; that it is the chief tester of human truth, or error; and, even down to its minutest subdivisions, it cannot be safely disregarded. The same eclipse, for instance, of sun by moon, as seen from the same place, cannot occur at two different times, only at one time; and that one epoch is capable of the sharpest definition, even down to a fractional part of a second.

To astronomy therefore only, of the modern sciences, can we reasonably look for some safe guidance in the practical measuring of time.

In the broadest sense, time is said to be measured by the amount of movement of some body moving at an equable rate. And the most equable motion by far, 324the only motion that has not sensibly varied within the period of human history, is, I might almost say, the favourite, or at least the fundamental, Pyramid phenomenon of the rotation of the earth upon its axis.

Not that even that movement is absolutely uniform through all possible time, in the eye of theory; but that, tested practically in the most rigid manner, or by the determination of the length of a sidereal day, no certain alteration has been perceived by practical astronomy during the last 2,300 years. The next most equable movement too, but of far longer period, is a secular consequence of that diurnal rotation, combined with the spheroidal figure, obliquity of axis, and an active disturbing element, the gravitation attraction of the sun and moon; producing thereby the “‘ precession of the equinoxes’’; whose whole cycle is performed in about nine and a half millions of these days, or turnings of the earth upon its own axis before a distant fixed star; and of which grand cycle not more than a sixth part has been performed yet, within all the period of human history.⁴

But though these two very distinct, and most different, phenomena,—the sidereal day, and the precessional period, of the earth, may be the grand storehouses for reference in the regulation of time for high science,—some easy, simple, yet striking modification 325of each is required for the practical purposes of man in general. And then comes in the evident propriety of using, for the shorter period, a solar, rather than a sidereal, defined day; and in place of the excessively long precessional period,—but without losing sight of its aptitudes for historical purposes,—the more moderate cycle of a year; i.e. the time of the earth's revolution round the same solar orb. Such annual motion, moreover, we must adhere to, although it is a movement experiencing many minute perturbations; and though it both is, and has been through the whole human period of development of the universe, a by no means nearly even multiple of the other, or daily, movement, whether we define the year by reference to either sidereal cum solar, or purely solar, phenomena.

Of different kinds of days upon this Earth.

These are practical points on which it is well worth while to spend a few more words, in order to try to make the Pyramid case clearer to those of our readers who desire further information. Let us begin then with the days.

As the sidereal day is defined, in apparent astronomy, to be the interval elapsing between a star leaving the meridian of any place, through the earth's diurnal revolution on its axis, and returning to it again (+ an excessively small correction for the slow, precessional movement in the interval); so a solar day is the time elapsing between the sun being on the meridian of any one place and seeming to return to it again. And that portion of time is equal to a sidereal day + the amount, measured by the rate of solar annual motion, that the sun has, in the diurnal interval, apparently retrograded among the stars, but by the really onward motion of the earth in its ceaseless annual orbit around the sun's 326splendid light-, and heat-, dispensing sphere. Hence a solar day of the earth is longer than a sidereal one; and in such proportion, that if a year contain $365\frac{1}{4}$ of the former, it will contain roughly $366\frac{1}{4}$ of the latter.

When absolute diurnal equality is required from day to day, the solar days have to go through a computation formula to reduce them from real solar days (as they may appear to an observer, and therefore also called apparent) to what are termed mean solar days; or the successive places that the sun would occupy in our sky if, in place of the earth revolving in an elliptical orbit with a variable velocity, it revolved in a circular orbit with a constant velocity, the time of a whole revolution remaining the same. But as this is only a residual correction, which does not alter the beginning or ending of the year at all, or the beginning or ending of any day sensibly to the mere beholder of the general features of nature,—we may consider it at once as adopted; and then proceed to contrast the only really opposing kinds of day, viz. the sidereal and the solar, together, as to their relative aptitudes to promote the greatest good of the greatest number of mankind.

Of the beginning of a sidereal day, then, hardly more than a dozen persons in the kingdom are aware; and, as it begins at a different instant of solar time each day (in the course of a year passing through the whole 24 hours), even those few doctrinaires can only inform themselves of the event by looking at their watches under due regulation.

But, of the far more easily distinguishable beginning of a solar day, it was thus that a devout, though not sacred or inspired, poet of the Talmud wrote centuries ago; and he will probably be equally heart-appreciated still by 9,999 out of every 10,000 of the population:—

“ Hast thou seen the beauteous dawn, the rosy harbinger of day? Its brilliancy proceeds from the 327dwellings of God: a ray of the eternal, imperishable light, a consolation to man.

“As David, pursued by his foes, passed a dreadful night of agony in a dreary cleft of Hermon’s rock, he sang the most exquisitely plaintive of his Psalms:—‘My soul is among lions: I lie in the dark pit among the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. Awake up, my glory, awake lute and harp, I myself will awake right early.’

“Behold! the dawn then broke; heaviness endured for a night, but joy came in the morning. With sparkling eyes ‘the hind of the morning,’ the soft and rosy twilight, sprang forth, skimmed over hill and dale, bounding from hill-top to hill-top further than one can see; and like a message of the Deity, addressed the solitary fugitive on the sterile rock: ‘Why dost thou complain that help is not near? See how I emerge from the obscurity of the night, and the terrors of darkness yield before the genial ray of cheerful light!’

“David’s eye was turned to the brightening hue of the morn. Light is the countenance of the Eternal. He saw the day-dawn rise, followed by the sun in all its matutinal splendour, pouring blessings and happiness over the earth. Confidence and hope returned to his soul, and he entitled his Psalm in the Cave of Adullam, ‘the roe of the morning, the song of the rosy dawn!’”

If any species of day, then, is marked in the Great Pyramid’s metrological system, is it likely, after what we have already seen of that building’s kindly feelings for man at large, its general objects and methods, its earth’s annual orbit round the sun, and its sun-distance, —is it likely, I say (for it has been doubted by some), to be any other than the earth’s solar day (the mean solar day, too, if it be represented evenly in the 328base-side of the grand immovable building, by a cubit length) ?

And for the same reason, the Pyramid year can be no other than the mean solar tropical year; or that which is defined by the sun returning to the same tropic or place of turning in its apparent motion in the sky; bringing on, therefore, the winter and summer, the typical night and day of the year, in the same self-evident, powerful, beneficent manner to all mankind. And of the previously concluded mean solar days, in such a solar tropical year, there are contained at present, according to modern astronomy,

a length said to be nearly 25 seconds shorter than the similar year in the time of the Great Pyramid.

The next succeeding arrangement, however, of time, in all Biblically-religious, and some other, metrological systems, after days, is not this grand, natural, yet most inconveniently incommensurable, one of a year; but the short, and, by days, perfectly commensurable, one of, a week; commensurable, however, not by the Pyramidal 5 or by 10, but by the peculiar, and other than mere arithmetically impressive, number 7.

Indeed, the week of 7 days is something so important in itself, and forms, when further taken with its Sabbatic impressment, so decided a stage of time, whereon tradition conflicts with science, sacred opposes profane, and the Deistic contends with the rationalistic,—that we cannot address ourselves too earnestly or too carefully to ascertain what the primeval Great Pyramid may have to say further, if anything, touching this spiritual, as well as the other natural, subdivisions of time for the ruling of the life, and regulation of the work, of man while on his trial here.