Taylor observes--"The smaller 24.88 is the Sacred Cubit which measured the diameter of the Earth _before_ the Flood; the one by which Noah measured the Ark, as tradition says; and the one in accordance with which all the interior works of the Great Pyramid were constructed.[271] The larger (25) is the Sacred Cubit of the _present_ Earth, according to the standard of the Great Pyramid when it was completed." Surely such marked diversities and contradictions, and such strange hypothetical adjustments and re-adjustments of the data and calculations, entirely upset the groundless and extraordinary theory of the base of the pyramid being a standard of linear measurement; or a segment of any particular axis of the earth; or a standard for emitting a system of new inches and new cubits;--seeing, on the one hand, more particularly, that the basis line of the pyramid is still itself an unknown and undetermined linear quantity, as is also the polar axis of the earth of which it is declared and averred to be an ascertained, determined, and measured segment. M. Paucton, in 1780, wrote a work in which he laid down the base side of the pyramid as 8754 inches; maintained, like Mr. Taylor and Mr. Smyth, that this length was a standard of linear measures; found it to be the measure of a portion of a degree of the meridian, such degree being itself the 360th part of a circle;--and apparently the calculations and figures answered as well as when the measurement was declared to be 9142 inches, and the line not a segment of an arc of the circumference of the earth, but a segment of the polar axis of the earth; for De l'Isle lauds Paucton's meridian degree theory as one of the wondrous efforts of human genius, or (to use his own words) "as one of the chief works of the human mind!" Yet the errors into which Paucton was seduced in miscalculating the base line of the Pyramid as 8754 inches, and the other ways he was misled, are enough--suggests Professor Smyth--"to make poor Paucton turn in his grave." SIGNIFICANCE OF CYPHERS AND FIVES.