PYRAMIDS, (Encycl.) Dr Bryant has lately maintained, with considerable force of argument, this opinion, that the pyramids were designed for high altars and temples, and were constructed in honour of the Deity. If the chief pyramid was designed for a place of burial, what occasion, says he, was there for a well, and for passages of communication which led to other buildings? The apartments near the pyramids he supposes to be designed for the reception of priests, and to be appendages, not to a tomb, but to a temple of the Deity. The stone coffin, he apprehends, was a trough or reservoir for water, which by means of the well they drew from the Nile. The priests of Egypt delighted in obscurity, and they probably came by the subterraneous passages of the building to the dark chambers within; where they performed their lustrations, and other nocturnal rites. Many, he adds, of the ancient temples in this country were caverns in the rock, enlarged by art, and cut out into numberless dreary apartments; for no nation upon the earth was so addicted to gloom and melancholy as the Egyptians. From the top of the pyramids they observed the heavens, and marked the constellations; and upon the same eminence it is probable that they offered up vows and oblations.