But this style of monstrous building perplexes as much by its general diffusion, as by the magnitude of its several instances. We find it not only in Egypt, where the Pyramids spread for _seventy_ miles along the western shore of the Nile, and once evidently clustered like Arab tents, but in Upper Egypt and Nubia: they are to be found also in Mesopotamia. The Birs Nimrod, (the temple of Belus,) and the Mujelibè, near Babylon, were evidently built on the pyramidal plan, if not actual pyramids. They have been found in India. They have been found even on the other side of the Atlantic; and the largest in the world is the pyramid of Cholula, in Mexico, covering an area of more than forty-seven acres, or above _three_ times the base of the greatest Egyptian pyramid. All the pyramids, in both Asia, Africa, and America, have the sides facing the cardinal points, excepting those of Nubia,--an exception probably arising from the rudeness of the people. In many of those pyramids, remnants of the dead, and bones of the lower animals, have been found; but both may have been placed there for purposes of superstition. The resistance of the pyramidal form to the effects of climate has been surmised as the origin of the choice; but the equatorial countries of the East know little of the weather which, among us, destroys public constructions. It is at least possible, that a form so little adapted to dwelling, or to any of the common uses of life, or even to the direct purposes of sepulture, may have been chosen, from its resemblance to the shape of flame kindled on a large scale. The Egyptians chiefly buried their dead in catacombs. The pyramid was undoubtedly borrowed from the East; and, like the obelisk--also an Eastern memorial, whose general uselessness still perplexes inquiry--may have been an emblem of that worship of fire, which ascends to so remote an antiquity, was the worship of the early East, and was, we are strongly inclined to believe, the general worship of the apostate antediluvian world.