The incidentally but totally erroneous summation which Professor Smyth thus makes of the nine equivocal quantities in his table, as amounting to 25.07, he declares (to use his own strong words) as a "_really glorious consummation_ for the geodesical science of the present day to have brought to light;" for he avers this length of 25.07--(which he forthwith elects to alter and change, without any given reason whatever, to 25.025 British inches)--being, he observes, "practically the sacred Hebrew cubit, is _exactly_ one ten-millionth (1-10,000,000th) of the earth's semi-axis of rotation; and _that is_ the very best mode of reference to the earth-ball as a whole, for a linear standard through all time, that the highest science of the existing age of the world has yet struck out or can imagine. In a word, the Sacred Cubit, _thus_ realised, forms an instance of the most advanced and perfected human science supporting the truest, purest, and most ancient religion; while a linear standard which the chosen people in the earlier ages of the world were merely told by maxim to look on as _sacred_, compared with other cubits of other lengths, is proved by the progress of human learning in the latter ages of time, to have had, and still to have, a philosophical merit about it which no men or nations at the time it was first produced, or within several thousand years thereof, could have possibly thought of for themselves." Besides, adds he elsewhere, "an _extraordinarily_[262] convenient length too, for man to handle and use in the common affairs of life is the one ten-millionth of the earth's semi-axis of rotation when it comes to be realised, for it is extremely close to the ordinary human arm, or to the ordinary human pace in walking, with a purpose to measure." Of course all these inferences and averments regarding the Sacred Cubit being an exact segment of the polar axis disappear, when we find Sir Isaac Newton's length of the Sacred Cubit is not, as Professor Smyth elects it to be, 25.025 British inches; nor 25.07, as he incorrectly calculated it to be from the mean of the nine quantities selected and arranged in his table; nor 25.29, as is the actual mean of these nine quantities in his table; but, "_according_ to Sir Isaac Newton's" own reiterated statement and conclusion, 24.753. (See footnote, p. 245.) A Sacred Cubit, according to Sir Isaac Newton's admeasurements of it, of 24.75 inches, would not, by thousands of cubits, be one ten-millionth of the measure of the semi-polar axis of the earth; provided the polar axis be, as Professor Smyth elects it to be, 500,500,000 British inches.[263] AXIS OF THE EARTH AS A STANDARD OF MEASURE.