But is there any valid reason whatever for fixing and determining, as an ascertained mathematical fact, the polar axis of the earth to be this very precise and exact measure, with its formidable tail of cyphers? None, except the supposed requirements or necessities of Professor Smyth's pyramid metrological theory. The latest and most exact measurements are acknowledged to be those of Captain Clarke, who, on the doctrine of the earth being a spheroid of revolution computes the polar axis to be 500,522,904 British inches, calculating it from the results of all the known arcs of meridian measures. If we grant that the Sacred Cubit could be allowed to be exactly 25.025 inches, which Sir Isaac Newton found it not to be; and if we grant that the polar axis is exactly 500,500,000 British inches, which Captain Clarke did not find it to be; then, certainly, as shown by Professor Smyth, there would be 20,000,000 of these supposititious pyramidal cubits, or 500,000,000 of the supposititious pyramidal inches in this supposititious polar axis of the earth. "In so far, then" (writes Professor Smyth), "we have in the 5, with the many 0's that follow, a pyramidally commensurable and symbolically appropriate unit for the earth's axis of rotation." But such adjustments have been made with as great apparent exactitude when entirely different earth-axes and quantities were taken. Thus Mr. John Taylor shows the inches, cubits, and axes to answer precisely, although he took as his standard a totally different diameter of the earth from Professor Smyth. The diameter of the earth at 30 deg. of latitude--the geographical position of the Great Pyramid--is, he avers, some seventeen miles, or more exactly 17.652 miles longer than at the poles.[267] But Mr. Taylor fixed upon this diameter of the earth at latitude 30 deg.--and not, like Professor Smyth, upon its polar diameter--as the standard for the metrological linear measures of the Great Pyramid; and yet, though the standard was so different, he found, like Mr. Smyth, 500,000,000 of inches also in his axis, and 20,000,000 of cubits also.[268] The resulting figures appear to fit equally as well for the one as for the other. Perhaps they answer best on Mr. Taylor's scheme. For Mr. Taylor maintained that the diameter of the earth before the Flood, at this selected point of 30 deg., was less by nearly 37 miles than what it was subsequently to the flood,[269] and is now; a point by which he accounts for otherwise unaccountable circumstances in the metrological doctrines which have been attempted to be connected with the Great Pyramid. For while Mr. Taylor believes the Sacred Cubit to be 24.88, or possibly 24.90 British inches, he holds the new Pyramidal cubit to be 25 inches in full; and the Sacred and Pyramidal cubits to be different therefore from each other, though both inspired. In explanation of this startling difference in two measures supposed to be equally of sacred[270] origin, Mr.