awal of this table,
etc., and in this way so far confessed the justice of the exposition of
his errors on this all-vital and testing point in his theory of the
Sacred Cubit, as given in p. 243, etc., of the present essay. He
attributes his errors to "an unfortunate misprinting of the calculated
numbers;" and (though he does not at all specialise what numbers were
thus misprinted) he gives from Sir Isaac Newton's Dissertation on the
Sacred Cubit a new and more lengthened table instead of the old and
erroneous table. For this purpose, instead of selecting as he did,
without any attempted explanation in his old table, _only five_ of Sir
Isaac Newton's estimations or "methods of approach," he now, in his new
table, takes _seven_ of them to strike out new "means." The simple
"mean" of all the seven quantities tabulated--as calculated, in the way
followed, in his first published table--is 25.47 British inches; and the
"mean" of all the seven means in the Table is 25.49 British inches.
Unfortunately for Professor Smyth's theory of the Sacred Cubit being
25.025 British inches, either of these numbers makes the Sacred Cubit
nearly half a British inch longer than his avowed standard of length--an
overwhelming difference in any question relating to a _standard_
measure. What would any engineer, or simple worker in metal, wood, or
stone, think of an alleged _standard_ measure or cubit which varied so
enormously from its own alleged length? But, surely, such facts and such
results require no serious comment.

In this, his latest communication on the Pyramids, Professor Smyth also
offered some new calculations regarding the measurements of the interior
of the broken stone coffin standing in the King's Chamber. Formerly
(1864), he elected the cubic capacity of this sarcophagus to be 70,900
"pyramidal" cubic inches; latterly he has elected it to be 71,250 cubic
inches. According, however, to his own calculations, he found,
practically, that it measured neither of these two numbers; but instead
of them 71,317 pyramidal inches (_see_ vol. iii. p. 154). The capacity
of the interior of this coffin does not hence correspond at all to the
supposititious standard of 71,250 pyramidal cubic inches; but in order
to make it appear to do so he has now struck a "mean" between the
measurement of the interior of the vessel and some of the measurements
of its exterior, in a way that was not easily comprehensible in his
demonstration. But what other ho