When we look at the ruins of some ancient abbey, Netley, Melrose, or Tintern, at Stonehenge in its solitude on the Wiltshire plains, or the pyramids of the sandy tracts that border on the Nile, near Cairo, the idea suggested to the mind is that of a vast antiquity. The thoughts range back to the time when the builders of the structure before us were living men; and as we picture how generation after generation has passed away since their time, we are forcibly impressed with the nothingness of our lives compared with the life-time of our race. Yet, to the student of science these structures are but young; even the longest-lasting of them is but short-lived. To the antiquarian the pyramids seem built to last forever; the geologist finds in the continuance of the stone mounds for a few thousand years only evidence of the far vaster duration of the time-intervals during which the mounds of nature must remain, Yet even of these he has learned that
"The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands; Like mists they melt, the solid lands; Like clouds, they shape themselves and go."
Knowing this, and that even the everlasting hills remain but for an instant when their duration is compared with the life-times of planets and suns, the astronomer is half disposed to smile at the thought of attributing a hoar antiquity to these monuments, which had not even been built when already the now existing hills were hundreds of times older than these stone mounds will ever be. The geologist, too, finds in the very stone of which the pyramids are built the evidence of æons of years for each day that they themselves have lasted. He sees from the structure of this stone that it was formed in a far-off period (the eocene age) when a vast sea, probably covering the whole region where the pyramids stand, received slowly a deposit of sandy débris, mixed with the remains of multitudinous forms of submarine and pelagic life. During tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years the nummulitic limestone was being formed beneath the waves of ocean. The sands which helped to make that limestone belong to an older formation still, itself formed in turn from still older rocks; and so he looks backward over the oft-times repeated change, a single oscillation only of which is pictured in the words:
"There rolls the deep, where grew the tree; Oh, earth, what changes hast thou seen! There, where the loud street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea."
Compared with the vast periods of time thus brought before our thoughts as among the demonstrated yet inconceivable truths of science, the life-time of such a structure as the great pyramid seems but as the duration of a breath. Yet, viewed as men must view the works of man, the pyramids of Egypt derive a profound interest from their antiquity. Young, compared with the works of nature, they are, of all men's works, the most ancient. They were ancient when temples and abbeys whose ruins now alone remain, were erected, and it seems as though they would endure till long after the last traces of any building now existing, or likely to be built by modern men, has disappeared from the surface of the earth. Nothing, it should seem, but some vast natural catastrophe ingulfing them beneath a new ocean, or hurling them down from the slopes of a new-formed mountain range, can destroy them utterly, unless the same race of beings which undertook to rear these vast masses should take in hand the task of destroying them.
Thus viewed, as the most ancient and the most impressive works of the human race, the pyramids have an interest to all students of human history and of human nature. It is impossible to consider carefully any of the works of man without learning something of the events which took place when those works were carried on, and something also of the character, the ideas, and the beliefs of the men to whom those works were due. If we can solve the problem presented by these strange structures, we shall have learned a lesson in the most ancient of all histories; we shall have gleaned some knowledge worth having about the ways and thoughts of the oldest civilized race whose material records have reached our time.
In undertaking an inquiry of this sort, on which many have already entered and which presents difficulties of the most serious character, it is well that we should note the conditions under which such a problem can alone be successfully dealt with.
In the first place, we must resolutely determine that, when setting forth to find a theory, no theory shall lay hold of us, and, taking possession of our minds, prevent us from duly weighing the evidence for and against not only that theory, but others.