C URRENT LITE RAT URE.
Our Inheritance en the Great Pyramid. By Professor C. Pia* Smith, F.R.SS.L. and E., Astronomer Royal for Scotland. (Alexander Strahan and Co.)—What can be the value of a merely literary estimate of such a book as this ? It must be left to the astronomers and mathematicians. But certainly the professor seems to have made out a case for measur- ing the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, and of its interior passages, and above all of the porphyry coffer with all the exactitude science can attain. Without pretending to be able to follow the whole of the reason- ing, we are disposed to believe it proved that the Pyramid is a great standard of weights and measures, founded on a. unit of length equal to 1-500,000,000th of the earth's axis of rotation. And SirJohn Herschel seems to go thus far, audio agree that it i8 a better unit in a scientific point of view than the French, which is a fraction of a quadrant of the earth's surface. On the other hand, few probably will embrace the theory that the Pyramid must therefore have been the result of a pro.. Mosaic revelation given to its builder. And still less will he be able to admit that English weights and measures are relics, as it were, of that revelation, even supposing it to be proved that a "quarter" of wheat answers to a quarter of the contents of the porphyry coffer, and admit- ting that our inch is nearly the proper fraction of the earth's axis of rotation. But putting aside all this as mere coincidence, we must, if we accept the professor's facts about the Pyramid, admit that the wisdom of the Egyptian' was real wisdom after all, and that they possessed 2,500 years B.C. an amount of scientific knowledge which has been bat ever since, and is barely equalled even now. In any view of the case. the book is most ingenious and interesting, and we heartily recommend it to our readers.
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