ok for the entrance to the upper parts
of the Pyramid." (Vol. i. p. 156-7.) At p. 270 Professor Smyth again
alludes to this supposed mark, made up by two diagonal joints in the
passage floor, as evading the notice of all visitors, except "those very
few, or perhaps even that _one only man_, who had been previously
instructed to look for a certain almost microscopic mark on the
floor."]

APPENDIX.

I.--DERIVATION OF THE TERM PYRAMID. (_Page_ 219.)

Professor Smyth suggests the origin of the term Pyramid from the two
Coptic words, "_pyr_," "division," and "_met_," "ten." This derivation,
which he first heard of in Cairo, is, he believes, a significant
appellation for a metrological monument such as the Great Pyramid, and
coincides with its five-sided, five-cornered, etc., features (see
anteriorly, p. 255) and decimal divisions. But surely a name, which in
this metrological and arithmetical view of "powers and times of ten and
five," meant _division into ten_, and which divisional metrological
ideas applied, according to Professor Smyth, to one pyramid only, namely
the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, was not likely to have been applied as a
general term to all the other pyramidal structures in Egypt--not one of
which had, according to Professor Smyth himself, anything whatsoever of
this metrological or divisional character in their composition and
object. It is not likely that all these structures should have been
named from a series of qualities supposed to belong to _one_; but
altogether hidden and concealed, in these early times, even in that one
pyramid, being for the information of future times and generations.

In a similar spirit of exclusiveness, Mr. John Taylor derives the word
pyramid from the two Greek words [Greek: pyros], _wheat_, and [Greek:
metron], _measure_--apparently in the belief that the coffer or
sarcophagus within one pyramid (the Great Pyramid) was intended as a
chaldron measure of wheat--though none of the sarcophagi, in any of the
many other royal pyramidal sepulchres of Egypt, were at all intended
for such standard measures; and although, according to Mr. Taylor's
theory, the Greeks, too, who out of their own language applied the term
of Pyramid, or Wheat-Measurer, to all these structures,--never dreamed
of the Great Pyramid or of any other of them having locked up in one of
its concealed chambers a supposed standard measure of capacity of wheat,
water, etc., for all nations and all times.