What, then, was he to do? How was what he had to be spent in such a manner as that he might himself get something from it? How was he to have himself the spending of it? A Pyramid is utterly unproductive, and all but utterly useless. It is a building that does not give shelter to any living thing, in which nothing can be stored up, excepting a corpse, and that cannot even be entered. Still it was of as much benefit to the man who built it as leaving the surplus labour, and food he had at his disposal, and the valuables he had in his treasury, unused would be. And those who built Pyramids had at their absolute command any amount of labour, and any amount of food. Here, then, was a great temptation to raise monuments of this kind to themselves. What treasure they had might as well be sunk in stones, as remain bottled up barrenly. They would, at all events, spend it themselves, and get for it an eternal monument. They would have the pleasure of raising themselves their own monuments. They would have the satisfaction of providing a safe and magnificent abode for their own mummies. If they had had at home Egyptian Three per Cent. Government Consols, or could have bought Chinese, Hindoo, or Assyrian Five per Cent. Stocks; or if the thought had occurred to them, which not long afterwards did occur to their successors, of reclaiming from the Desert, by irrigation, the district of the Faioum; or if they had foreseen that in times to come the Hyksos and the Persians might invade Egypt, and that possibly a rampart from Pelusium to the metropolis, such as was afterwards constructed, might assist in keeping them in check in the Desert, where there would be a chance of their perishing from thirst; or if Egypt had been, like Ceylon, a country in which mountain streams could be dammed up in the wet season for irrigating the land in the dry; or, like Yucatan, where enormous tanks for the storage of the rainfall are indispensable; then it is evident that the surplus labour and food, and the silver ingots in the King’s treasury, would have been spent in some one or other of these ways. But some of these things were not possible in Egypt, and the time for thinking of the others had not yet come. There was, therefore, no alternative. It must be something as unproductive as a Pyramid, or a temple. The intense selfishness of man, such as he was in those early days, prevented his having any repugnance to the idea of a Pyramid all for himself: it rather, on the contrary, commended the idea to his mind. And so it came about that the Pyramids were built. The whole process is as clear to us as it would be, had we ourselves, in some well-remembered stage of a previous existence, been the builders, and not Cheops and Chephren. We see the conditions under which they acted, and the mental process by which they were brought to the only conclusion possible to them. * * * * *