this "determination" not to be so
much depended upon as the measurements made from socket to socket.

The mean of the only four series of such socket or casing stone measures
as have been recorded hitherto by the French Academicians (9163), Vyse
(9168), Mahmoud Bey (9162), and Inglis (9110), amounts to nearly 9150.
The first three of these observers were only able to measure the north
side of the pyramid. Mr. Inglis measured all the four sides, and found
them respectively 9120, 9114, 9102, and 9102, making a difference of 18
inches between the shortest and longest. Professor Smyth thinks the
measures of Mr. Inglis as on the whole probably too _small_, and he
takes two of them, 9114 and 9102--(but, strangely, not the largest,
9120)--as data, and strikes a new number out of these two, and out of
the three previous measures of the French Academicians, Vyse, and
Mahmoud Bey; from these five quantities making a calculation of "means,"
and electing 9142 as the proper measure of the basis line of the
pyramid--(which exact measure certainly none of its many measurers ever
yet found it to be); and upon this _foundation_, "derived" (to use his
own words) "from the best modern measures yet made," he proceeds to
reason, "as the happy, useful, and perfect representation of 9142," and
the great standard for linear measure revealed to man in the Great
Pyramid. Surely it is a remarkably strange _standard_ of linear measure
that can only be thus elicited and developed--not by direct measurement
but by indirect logic; and regarding the exact and precise length of
which there is as yet no kind of reliable and accurate certainty.

Lately, Sir Henry James, the distinguished head of the Ordnance Survey
Department, has shown that the length of one of the sides of the pyramid
base, with the casing stones added, as measured by Colonel H. Vyse--viz.
9168 inches--is precisely 360 derahs, or land cubits of Egypt; the derah
being an ancient land measure still in use, of the length of nearly
25-1/2 British inches, or, more correctly, of 25.488 inches; and he has
pointed out that in the construction of the body of the Great Pyramid,
the architect built 10 feet or 10 cubits of horizontal length for every
9 feet or 9 cubits of vertical height; while in the construction of the
inclined passages the proportion was adhered to of 9 on the incline to 4
in vertical height, rules which would altogether simplify the building
of such a structure.[254] The Egyp