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STUDY OF THE PYRAMIDS. 299
monsoon seasons, are from the south-west and north-east.
These strike the corner angles, rather than the facial fronts
of the pyramids, thus tempering the storms to
the preservation
of the structures. And then they are located in that
latitude best designed to prevent the African sands from
swooping down upon certain fertile localities of the Nile.
Further, the form of their structures is founded upon the
extreme and mean ratio, so well known to geometricians.
II. — The size of the Great Pyramid, Cheops, is so nicely
proportioned upon mathematical and architectural principles,
as to indicate the number of revolutions made by the earth
on its yearly axis in terms of a certain unit of linear measure
while other numbers measure the length of the semi-axis of
the earth's rotation.
III. — The angle of inclination towards its central axis is
such that its vertical hight is to the continued length of the
four sides of its base as the radius to the circumference of a
circle ; and this is a' fractional quantity lying at the very base
of mathematics.
IV. — This unit of linear measure, alias unit of length, was
the same as the cubit of the Hebrews, and identical with the
inches of our ancestral Anglo-Saxons, and the present British
inch, into less than a thousandth part. Practically, then,
the unit of linear measure in the pyramid is the same in
lenjjth as the American inch. Thus mav our mensuration be
traced through Britain, Rome, Greece, to Egypt of the
pyramidal era.
V. — The geometrical knowledge of the pyramid-builders
began where Euclid's ended ; for Euclid's forty-seventh
problem, said to have been discovered by Pythagoras, and to
have caused the sacrifice of a whole hecatomb of oxen, is
common all through the pyramids.
" When the great Samian sage his noble problem found,
A hundred oxen dyed with their life-blood the ground."