which they were erected until the present, few persons have beheld them towering above the plain of the desert, reflecting back the burning sun of noon, or throwing their morning or evening shadows over the sand, without being smitten with a sense of the sublime, and experiencing in their hearts a secret pride at the boldness and elevation of their founders' conception. And this feeling will be heightened into something of a religious character, if, rejecting, the vulgar notion of their being nothing but royal tombs, we suppose, what might, I think, be all but demonstrated, that they were originally temples dedicated to the passive generative power of nature, the Bhavani of the Hindoos, the Athor-Isis of the Egyptians, and the Aphrodite and Venus of the Greeks and Romans. To Dr. Shaw, however, this theory did not present itself. He was contented with the old idea, suggested by the etymology of the word, that they might, perhaps, have been fire-temples; but he observes that the mouth of the pyramids, as well as the end of the mystic chest in the interior, points to the north, the original Kiblah, or "praying-*point," of the whole human race. Other sacred edifices of Egypt, as Herodotus observes, had their doors on the northern side; the table of shew-bread was placed in the same situation in the tabernacle; and in Hindostan the piety or the superstition of the people points in the same direction.
Of the animals of Egypt which, from the frequent mention made of them in classical literature, are regarded as curiosities, the most remarkable, as the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and the ibis, are now exceedingly rare. Indeed, though the crocodile is sometimes found above the cataracts, it is totally unknown to those who live lower down the river, and the hippopotamus and the ibis, the latter of which was once so plentiful, may be regarded as extinct in Egypt. To make some amends for these losses, there is a great abundance of storks, which,
