The Egyptian Pyramids.--How many illustrious travelers in all ages have sat and gazed upon the scene around! and how endless are the speculations in which they have indulged! "The epochs, the builders, and the objects of the pyramids," says Gliddon, "had, for two thousand years, been dreams, fallacies, or mysteries." To begin at the beginning, some have supposed them to be antediluvian; others, that they were built by the children of Noah to escape from a second flood--by Nimrod, by the Pali of Hindostan, and even the ancient Irish. It was a favorite theory until very lately, that they were the work of the captive Israelites. The Arabians attributed them to the Jins or Genii; others to a race of Titans. Some have supposed them to have been the granaries built by Joseph; others, intended for his tomb, or those of the Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea, or of the bull Apis. Yeates thinks they soon followed the Tower of Babel, and both had the same common design; while, according to others, they were built with the spoils of Solomon's temple and the riches of the queen of Sheba. They have been regarded as temples of Venus, as reservoirs for purifying the waters of the Nile, as erected for astronomical or mathematical purposes, or intended to protect the valley of the Nile from the encroachments of the sands of the desert (this notable theory, too, is quite recent); in short, for every conceivable and inconceivable purpose that could be imagined by superstitious awe, by erudition groping without data in the dark, or reasoning upon the scanty and suspicious evidence of Grecian writers. At length, after a silence of thousands of years, the discoveries of Champollion have enabled the monuments to tell their own tale; their mystery has been, in great measure, unraveled, and the names of their founders ascertained. The explorations of Colonel Vyse, Perring, and recently of Lepsius, have brought to light the remains of no less than _sixty-nine_ pyramids, extending in a line from Abouroash to Dashoor. These, by the discovery of the names of their founders, are proved to have been a succession of royal mausolea, forming the most sublime Necropolis in the world. The size of each different pyramid is supposed to bear relation to the length of the reign of its builder, being commenced with the delving of a tomb in the rock for him at his accession, over which a fresh layer of stones was added every year until his decease, when the monument was finished and closed up. Taking the number of these Memiphite sovereigns and the average length of their reigns, the gradual construction of the pyramids would, therefore, it is presumed, extend over a period, in round numbers, of some _sixteen hundred years!_ Imagination is left to conceive the antecedent period required for the slow formation of the alluvial valley of the Nile until it became fit for human habitation, whether it was first peopled by an indigenous race, or by an Asiatic immigration, already bringing with