aroundworldortra00peebiala-1

294 AHOTTND THE WORLD.
desert." This style has been too common with the flippant,
the facile, and the ambitious, from the time of Pliny, down
to the novelist Sir Walter Scott.
It is needless to remind the historian that the old Greeks
were exceedingly indignant with their distinguished traveler,
Halicarnassus, who, after having explored, extravagantly
praised the pyramids.
" What !
" said these vain Greeks ;
" does not our own divine Greece
possess monuments more worthy of intelligent admiration ? Had not
Greece the omphalos, or navel-stone of the whole earth, to show in the
temple of Delphi, in order to prove that Greece was the center of the
vast world's plain ? Were not Greek rocks and hills, Greek fountains and
groves, all hallowed by the presence of Grecian gods and goddesses of
every degree ? And were not the then inhabitants of Greece descended
by direct line from those superhuman beings ? What need had a Greek
to go to distant Egypt, and admire any thing not erected by genius of
Grecian artists ? "
Still, in the face of the most virulent opposition, in spite
of the boastful Greeks 500 B.C., in spite of Rome's proud
Caesars, in spite of twenty-five hundred years of persistent
attempts to sneer down and write down these monarchs of
the ages, there they stand, irrepressible^ — absolutely refusing
to be driven or scribbled into oblivion
OPINIONS OF THINKERS AND SAVANTS.
Saying nothing of German and French scholars who have
visited, measured, and written of the pyramids, — nothing
of Prof. John Greaves, Col. Howard Vyse, Sir Gardner
Wilkinson, and other men of letters,—we turn with pride
to Prof. C. Piazza Smythe, Astronomer Royal of Scotland.
When this erudite and eminent gentleman proposed to make
accurate measurements and scientific observations touching
Egypt's pyramidal glories, his fellow professors in the university
exclaimed, " What ! you, too, a believer in the
pyramids? Can you imagine for a moment that the
ancients had a knowledge of mechanics, of science, lost to