After reading these details it will be impossible, I conceive, for any dispassionate mind to remain longer in suspense as to the origin of the pyramids. The doubt, too, and obscurity in which they have been heretofore enveloped can be explained with similar ease, if we but remember the execration in which their Cushite founders were held by the Egyptians, and their consequent disinclination to associate their name with such splendid memorials. With this view, indeed, it is not at all improbable but that active legislative measures were adopted to cancel and suppress every vestige of proof which could tend to perpetuate the memory of the obnoxious erectors. So that we must not wonder if, after a lapse of years, their history was as great a riddle to the Egyptians themselves as that of _our pyramids_ is to the Irish nation. A collateral cause for this universal ignorance of their use and origin was the probable absence of letters on the part of the Egyptians, until now, for the first time, introduced by those learned Arabians; and though any one who is acquainted with the oriental disquisitions of Wilfrid, and the coincidences he establishes between the ancient history of Egypt and the account given of the customs and dynasties of that kingdom, as drawn from the Hindoo Puranas, will at once admit that “there must have been a period when a Hindoo power had reigned in Egypt by right of conquest,” and established therein the peculiar rites of their religion with the elements of literature and social civilisation, yet it is probable that during their sojourn, which, we have seen, was a continued series of warfare, they kept themselves aloof from all intercourse with the natives, and checked, as much as possible, the circulation of their science among them. Some _sparks_ of it, however, must inevitably have transpired; and the Egyptian intellect was too finely constituted to be insensible to its value, or allow it to extinguish without food; so that, in the time of Moses, and long after, their learning and accomplishments were courted by the philosophers of the day, and were so eminently conspicuous, as to become a proverb (Acts Apost. vii. 22). Homer, we all know, visited that favoured land--so did Pythagoras--so did Solon, Thales, Plato, and Eudoxus; in short, all the sages of antiquity, of whom we read so much, and whom we peruse with such _recuperative_ pleasure, either finished their education in that favoured school, or conversed with those who had themselves done so. The Egyptians are said to have been the first who brought the “rules of government,” with the art of making “life easy” and “a people happy”--the _true end_ of worldly politics--to a regular system. But much as they excelled other nations in scientific lore, in nothing was their superiority so conspicuous as in that _magic_ art which enabled them to cope, for so long a time, and under such trying varieties, even with the prophet and ambassador of God himself.