to fit equally as well for the one as for the
other. Perhaps they answer best on Mr. Taylor's scheme. For Mr. Taylor
maintained that the diameter of the earth before the Flood, at this
selected point of 30 deg., was less by nearly 37 miles than what it was
subsequently to the flood,[269] and is now; a point by which he
accounts for otherwise unaccountable circumstances in the metrological
doctrines which have been attempted to be connected with the Great
Pyramid. For while Mr. Taylor believes the Sacred Cubit to be 24.88, or
possibly 24.90 British inches, he holds the new Pyramidal cubit to be 25
inches in full; and the Sacred and Pyramidal cubits to be different
therefore from each other, though both inspired. In explanation of this
startling difference in two measures supposed to be equally of
sacred[270] origin, Mr. Taylor observes--"The smaller 24.88 is the
Sacred Cubit which measured the diameter of the Earth _before_ the
Flood; the one by which Noah measured the Ark, as tradition says; and
the one in accordance with which all the interior works of the Great
Pyramid were constructed.[271] The larger (25) is the Sacred Cubit of
the _present_ Earth, according to the standard of the Great Pyramid when
it was completed."

Surely such marked diversities and contradictions, and such strange
hypothetical adjustments and re-adjustments of the data and
calculations, entirely upset the groundless and extraordinary theory of
the base of the pyramid being a standard of linear measurement; or a
segment of any particular axis of the earth; or a standard for emitting
a system of new inches and new cubits;--seeing, on the one hand, more
particularly, that the basis line of the pyramid is still itself an
unknown and undetermined linear quantity, as is also the polar axis of
the earth of which it is declared and averred to be an ascertained,
determined, and measured segment.

M. Paucton, in 1780, wrote a work in which he laid down the base side of
the pyramid as 8754 inches; maintained, like Mr. Taylor and Mr. Smyth,
that this length was a standard of linear measures; found it to be the
measure of a portion of a degree of the meridian, such degree being
itself the 360th part of a circle;--and apparently the calculations and
figures answered as well as when the measurement was declared to be 9142
inches, and the line not a segment of an arc of the circumference of
the earth, but a segment of the polar axis of the earth; for De l'Is