[Footnote 266: The same idea of using the earth's axis as a standard of length has been suggested also by Professor Hennessy of Dublin, and by Sir John Herschel. See _Athenaeum_ for April 1860, pp. 581 and 617.] [Footnote 267: The diameter of the earth in latitude 30 deg. is really about 20 miles longer than the polar axis. But Mr. Taylor obviously did not know the nature of the spheroidal arcs of the meridian, and so falls into the most inconsistent assertions respecting the length of this particular diameter. Thus, in pp. 75 and 87, he asserts the diameter in latitude 30 deg. to be 500,000,000 inches [that is = 7891.414 miles], which is 7.756 miles _less_ than the polar axis--_the least_ diameter of all; whereas, in p. 95, he states this diameter in lat. 30 deg. to be 17.652 miles _greater_ than the polar axis.] [Footnote 268: "The diameter of the earth, according to the measures taken at the Pyramids, is 41,666,667 English feet, or 500,000,000 inches." (See _The Great Pyramid_, p. 75.) "Dividing this number by 20,000,000 we obtain the measure of 25 (English) inches for the Sacred Cubit" (p. 67).] [Footnote 269: "When" (says Mr. Taylor, p. 91) "the _new_ Earth was measured in Egypt after the Deluge, it was found that it exceeded the diameter of the _old_ Earth by the difference between 497,664,000 inches and 500,000,000 inches; that is, by 2,336,000 inches, equal to 36.868 miles."] [Footnote 270: _Alleged Sacred Character of the Scottish Yard or Ell Measure._--Professor Smyth tries to show (iii. 597), that if Britain stands too low in his metrological testing of the European kingdoms and races, its "low entry is due to accepting the yard for the country's popular measure of length." But long ago the "divine" origin of the Scottish ell--as in recent times the divine origin of the so-called pyramidal cubit and inch--was pleaded rather strenuously. For when, in the 13th century, Edward I. of England laid before Pope Boniface his reasons for attaching the kingdom of Scotland to the Crown of England, he maintained, among other arguments, the justice and legality of this appropriation on the ground that his predecessor King Athelstane, after subduing a rebellion in Scotland under the auspices of St. John of Beverley, prayed that through the intervention of that saint, it "might be granted to him to receive a visible and tangible token by which all future ages might be assured that the Scots were rightfully subject to the King of England. His prayer was granted in this way: Standing in front of one of the rocks at Dunbar, he made a cut at it with his sword, and left a score which proved to be the _precise_ length of an ell, and was adopted as the regulation test of that measure of length." This legend of the "miraculously created ellwand standard" was afterwards duly attested by a weekly service in the Church of St. John of Beverley. (See Burton's _History of Scotland_, ii. 319.) In the official account