d to be placed there for the detection of the
entrance to the interior chambers in these latter times, has been
discovered some 1000 years at least too late for the evolution of the
alleged miraculous arrangement. And in relation to the Great Pyramid, as
to other matters, we may be sure that God does not teach by the medium
of miracle anything that the unaided intellect of man can find out; and
we must beware of erroneously and disparagingly attributing to Divine
inspiration and aid, things that are imperfect and human.

* * * * *

The communication concluded by a series of remarks, in which it was
pointed out that at the time at which the Great Pyramid was built,
probably about 4000 years ago, mining, architecture, astronomy, etc.,
were so advanced in various parts of the East as to present no obstacle
in the way of the erection of such magnificent mausoleums, as the
colossal Great Pyramid and its other congener pyramids undoubtedly are.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 233: See on other proposed significations and origins of the
word pyramid, APPENDIX, No. I.]

[Footnote 234: In the plain of Troy, and on the higher grounds around
it, various barrows still remain, and have been described from Pliny,
Strabo, and Lucia down to Lechevalier, Forchhammer, and Maclaren. In
later times, Choiseul and Calvert have opened some of them. Homer gives
a minute account of the obsequies of Patroclus and the raising of his
burial-mound, which forms, as is generally believed, one of those twin
barrows still existing on the sides of the Sigean promontory, that pass
under the name of the tumuli of Achilles and Patroclus. Pope, in
translating the passage describing the commencement of the funeral pyre,
uses the word pyramid. For

... "those deputed to inter the slain,
Heap with a rising _pyramid_ the plain."

Professor Daniel Wilson, in alluding, in his _Prehistoric Annals_, vol.
i. p. 74, to this account by Homer of the ancient funeral-rites, and
raising of the funeral-mound, speaks of the erection of Patroclus'
barrow as "the methodic construction of the Pyramid of earth which
covered the sacred deposit and preserved the memory of the honoured
dead."]

[Footnote 235: Colonel Pownall, while describing in 1770 the barrow of
New Grange, in Ireland, to the London Society of Antiquaries, speaks of
it as "a pyramid of stone." "This pyramid," he observes, "was encircled
at its base with a number of enormous