movements of mankind throughout history, without religion to guide them, the course of the French metrical system will be found full of vacillations, changes, alterations oppressions of the poor by the rich, and in the end a failure after the loss of invaluable time and wasted opportunity.

But from the standpoint you have happily taken up, you can demonstrate to your countrymen that the Anglo-Saxon weights and measures of to-day, excepting some adventitious adulterations of the dark ages which may easily be swept away, come to you with a noble antiquity and an assurance of solidity of foundation for the future, because they have lasted through 4,000 years of the past-viz., from the Great Pyramid standing geographically in, but not psychically appertaining to, the land of Egypt. Nor can that mighty duration, four thousand years, be shortened by anyone; for if you apply to any of the modern Egyptologists, so-called, generally free-thinkers, evolutionists and French metrical schoolmen, they will tell you that the Great Pyramid is far older still than four thousand years; and it is in the sizes, shapes and unalterable positions of its most vital and internal monumentalizations in pure stone, necessarily the work of its founders and authors, who were the honored recipients of Divine inspiration, knowledge as in the Bible, that the coeval character of Anglo-Saxon metrology and Great Pyramid masonry has been claimed and proved.

And, secondly, why is New York the right place for the International Institute, so long confined to Cleveland, Ohio, to make its first great stand in the face of the whole world? Because New York is the head of the United States of America, and they again have become, or are year by year rapidly becoming, the gathering place and agglomeration of the greatest number of the most intellectually advanced and the most enterprising AngloSaxons in the world. The local habitation and authoritative abode, too, for the English language itself, because now spoken, written and read there in all its Shakesperian purity and biblical power by the greatest number of educated millions in any country whatever. While all the scientific improvements and economies of time in modern life, from astronomical observatories to telephones, and from trans-continental railways to sewing machines, are more widely appreciated, and have been more extensively invented in the United States than amongst any other people on the face of the globe.

Why, therefore, should the United States, especially when she has Great Britain to back her therein, come down from her high position, denude herself of her more than human metrological heritage; and, like the rabble of little godless states of yesterday's birth, without a language of their own, or a history worth anything, be cajoled by a few semi-foreigners to inflict on her people the adoption of the French weights and measures, perhaps the French language, too, in the end, at the peril of fine, imprisonment and the point of the bayonet as well.

But this branch of the argument has been, and still may be, further described and illustrated by others with far more power and more right to do so than I can possibly have. Let me, therefore, rather confine myself, if a few more words may be allowed me, to the latest news touching that monumental foundation in primeval history for the best and most encouraging part of our views, viz., the Great Pyramid, the subject of my particular study at home and abroad, in Egypt and in England, through the last twenty years.

Although the British government has been lately so wonderfully put by a superintending Providence into actual possession of all the land and people of Egypt, from the very year A. D. 1882, as indicated by the Great Pyramid itself prophetically from the oldest of human historical time, yet it is certainly very surprising that that government, whether politically composed of Whigs or Tories, Radicals or Conservatives, holds itself steadily aloof from taking any visible interest in that one sublime monument there, which sanctifies Anglo-Saxon metrology, confirms the whole course of the Christian religion through

the Old as well as the New Testaments, and announces, through its very stones crying out, some of the leading events of the present and future time.

But the minds of individuals, as my daily correspondence (too extensive for me to fully attend to as I would) testifies, are becoming more and more exercised about the Great Pyramid in its religious and historical, as well as metrological, bearings. Not, indeed, all of those letter-writers are in favor of these views, as some are for and others against, according in general to their amount of knowledge of the subject, combined with some secret of predestination of their souls, known to God alone. But all classes of students seem increasing in fervor, each on their own lines; and the attacks of the malcontents have sometimes been fierce and malignant to a degree, yet have they generally resulted in bringing out some additional testimony in favor of our excelsior views of the ancient building.

As to the latest and most striking example, I would allude to the author of a recently published London book, on that deeply interesting question to all earnest New Testament Christians-the expected rapture of the church, some years before the second advent of our Lord, and the beginning of his visible millennial kingdom on the earth.

From an author dealing favorably, Scripturally, religiously with such a subject, who would not have expected the best treatment for the Great Pyramid, which typifies so much of the very same sacred events? But no! the said author denounces it; and then we remember Christ's own words to the effect that His doctrines were not to produce peace, but variance, even between those of the same household.

On what authority, however, does the author in question venture to assert that the Great Pyramid is of Satan, and is a fearful example of the pits of perdition into which the unwary Christians may fall?

His supposed authority is most instructive, though not in the direction he intends. He works by Kabbalistic arithmetic, which none of the Pyramid examiners have ever found there, and by applying it in the following manner: Out of all the Pyramid's many numerically measured and carefully computed quantities of measure, he picks two, viz.: the supposed length from north end of grand gallery to the fiducial line in the entrance passage, and the length of the grand gallery from north to south wall as taken through the step, without regarding the other greater length taken over the same. Although the former length has been described as 2,170 and a fraction, in Pyramid inches, the author calls it 2,169 even; and although the latter has been equally described as 1881.6 (meaning August, 1862), he, at his study table, turns it into 1881. And then, by dealing Kabbalistically with these two numbers of his own felonious perpetration, viz.: 2,169, 1,881–— viz. by summing up their digits in appearance, sideways, he makes them each 18; and 18 he says = 6+6+6; wherefore, evidently to him, the building which contains them is of the Devil.

I have before me, at this moment, a large book with more than 2,500 pages, so that I could easily turn up a page numbered 2169 and another 1881. But would that circumstance annihilate all the other pages and all the information in the book, and prove it to have been concocted in the infernal regions for the destruction of human souls? I do not think so; and the book is, after all, simply a Gazeteer, and descriptive largely of new towns and villages of the United States. Moreover, the Biblical 666 of evil repute, under certain conditions, is not composed of three digits, which make eighteen when added together, but as St. John takes the trouble to inform us, it is "six hundred, three.score and six," which in any honest arithmetic, or any admitted mode of paying one's debts, means something very different.

But the Great Pyramid is safer still from the Kabbalistic imputation, for the two measures taken by myself in 1865, which, within the limits of dishonest manipulation allowed to himself by the author, were brought to make up the Kabbalistic 18, were most fortunately remeasured by Mr. Flinders Petrie in his late attempt to invalidate the sacred

theory of the Great Pyramid, and were found to be in reality one of them nearly a unit and the other three whole units still larger than I had made them. Wherefore, the man who did not scruple to take one unit off an ancient number for a bad purpose, will yet hesitate before he ventures to abstract two, or three or four units, and consider himself justified before God.

Now, who would have thought, when Mr. Flinders Petrie's grand attack on the Pyramid was published so demonstratively and aggressively in New York and London on the same day, that it contained the most unexceptionable defence of the Great Pyramid against the Kabbalistic interpreter of the present year and his Satanic insinuations.

But thus it is that God causes even the wrath of man to praise him and testify to the holy purity of the one building on all the earth prepared from the beginning of the world, in order that it might become in the latter day, according to Isaiah, "a pillar and an altar unto the Lord."

If Great Britain still refuses to take possession of that primeval monument to Christianity in a land at present oppressed by Mohammedanism, will not the United States at last strike in and extend over it the shield of protection of her Pilgrim Fathers? And I remain, dear Mr. Latimer, in delighted admiration at the untiring manner in which you have been, year after year, working with all your might at this grand subject ever since you made acquaintance with it, your too weak fellow-worker,

C. PIAZZI SMYTH, Astronomer Royal for Scotland.

"GREAT FISHES, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY AND THREE."

To the International Institute for Perfecting Weights and Measures: If rightly I apprehend the business of your Institute, it is a sort of voice in the Wilderness, to make the crooked straight, to abolish chaos of sixes and sevens, and persuade men to the use of a "perfect and just measure; "-standards neither deteriorated by long ages of neglect, nor invented recklessly out of false refinements, but educed direct from the elementary functions of the kosmos. That is also part of the business of my life. As I cannot meet you face to face, you may be disposed to receive a written brief exposition of one of many cases, in which the elementary functions of the kosmos are interwoven in the Word of Him Who made the kosmos.

If a man believe in God at all, and if at the same time he be instructed in mathematic, and the relations of the kosmos, he should know well enough that the work of God is absolute in exactitude and precision; and that the ultimate refinement of

human mathematic cannot reach the exactitude of the work of God. He should understand that the precision of the relations of the kosmos of God, is simply the expression of the perfect righteousness of God; and that the noblest use of mathematic is simply to help us to get a far-off apprehension of the infinite righteousness of God.

But, then, how about the book we call the Word of God? There be priests and parsons who go about to apologize for what they say is the Word of God; to explain with more or less unction, by I know not how many and contradictory interpretations, that it may be "reconciled" with the "advanced

science," such as it is, of this nineteenth century. That surely is very strange! Surely if the book be of God, it can need apology no more than the kosmos of God.

it must be in precise accord with His kosmos. the kosmos, it cannot be the Word of God. make God a liar. He cannot lie.

If it be of God,

If it contradict That would be to

What happens is, that science is unspeakably arrogant, and has not yet arrived at the knowledge of its ignorance of the kosmos. On the other hand, we read the Scriptures by the murky light of commentators and traditions of the elders.

For the hundredth time, I declare this thesis.

That, in the very nature of the case, if the Scriptures be of God, they must be in advance of the most advanced human science.

A hundred times I have demonstrated that the Scriptures are certainly from God, because they are far in advance of the most advanced human science; a hundred times shown that they teem with irrefragable, final, absolute mathematical proofs that they are the very Word of Him Whose hand made the kosmos. In the nature of the case it must be so. God can work conceivably no other way than in absolute exactitude, beyond the last decimal of recorded computation.

Voice in the Wilderness indeed, in the midst of a shallow and slipshod generation, to cry out that "He maketh a weight for the wind, yea, He meteth out the waters by measure," is not a figure of speech, but a fact; that the "very hairs of our head are all counted" is not a metaphor, but a fact ;-must, in the nature of the case, be so, if there be God at all.

Seven years ago, I showed that the recorded measures of the Tabernacle and the Temple form a system representative of the elementary kosmic quantities, founded on the earth's polar axis, and its mean density (which is 5.7 exactly, with no further decimal); and that the sacred cube of the Holiest is the expression at once of the Earth's volume to the last cube cubit, and of its weight to the last ton.

So now let us consider what we mathematical people call a "particular case" where, under the veil of a quantity that seems at first sight to be the measure of no known thing in the heavens, the earth, or the waters beneath, we find a function of the three elements of the kosmos which for us on the Earth are fundamental, to-wit, the ratio, the time of the Earth's revolution round the sun, and its distance from the sun. These for us are fundamental, because they are the basis of all planetary and stellar computations.

There is a wondrous draught of fishes recorded by Luke. The fishermen had toiled through the weary night, and caught nothing. Then came Jesus, the Christ of God, who made both fishermen and fishes. At His word they run out the nets