In all these "standards" of capacity and length alleged to exist about
the Great Pyramid, not only are the theoretical and actual sizes of the
supposed "standards" made to vary in different books--which it is
impossible for an actual "standard" to do--but the evidences adduced in
proof of the conformity of old or modern measures with them is
notoriously defective in complete aptness and accuracy. Measures, to be
true counterparts, must, in mathematics, be not simply "near," or "very
near," which is all that is generally and vaguely claimed for the
supposed pyramidal proofs, but they must be entirely and _exactly_
alike, which the pyramidal proofs and so-called standards fail totally
and altogether in being. Mathematical measurements of lines, sizes,
angles, etc., imply exactitude, and not mere approximation; and without
that exactitude they are not mathematical, and--far more--are they not
"superhuman" and "inspired."
Besides, it must not be forgotten that our real _practical_ standard
measures are infinitely more refined and many thousand-fold more
delicate than any indefinite and equivocal measures alleged to be found
in the pyramid by even those who are most enthusiastic in the pyramidal
metrological theory. At the London Exhibition in 1851, that celebrated
mechanician and engineer, Mr. Whitworth, of Manchester, was the first to
show the possibility of ascertaining by the sense of touch alone the
one-millionth of an inch in a properly-adjusted standard of linear
measure; and in his great establishment at Manchester they work and
construct machinery and tools of all kinds with differences in linear
measurements amounting to one ten-thousandth of an inch. The standards
of the English inch, etc., made by him for the Government--and now used
by all the engine and tool makers, etc., of the United Kingdom--lead to
the construction of machinery, etc., to such minute divisions; and the
adoption of these standards has already effected enormous saving to the
country by bringing all measured metal machinery, instruments, and
tools, wherever constructed and wherever afterwards applied and used, to
the same identical series of mathematical and precise gauges.