"I may state that all that the author of Anc. Mons. writes in regard to these old faiths thoroughly supports what I urge, though he is far from looking at their features as I do, for he clearly knows very little of Eastern Phallic faiths and their interpretation. Ashtoreth is Ishtar or woman, the Star in more senses than one; the Phœnicians call her Astarte, but the 'present Mendean form is Ashtar,' and the plural Ashtaroth. Bunsen derives this representative name from the very coarse, but I fear perfectly correct source, '_the seat of the cow_--_Has_ and _toreth_;' for this is true to the idea of all Hindoos, and shows us that the terms 'male' and 'female' originally meant the _organs pur et simple_, which indeed the writer of Gen. i. 27 expresses in the words _Zakar_ and _Nekabah_. In all African and Arabian dialects, _Nana_ and not Ishtar is the commonest term for Mother, the usual initial being Ma, Ya, Ye, Ni, and rarely Om and On; see the long list of over one hundred names given by Sir John Lubbock as those of the 'non-Aryan nations of Europe and Asia' and of 'East Africa.' There we see Ma and even _Ama_ occasionally used for Father, perhaps because among some tribes the strange custom existed of his going to bed to protect and warm the infant as soon as born. The almost universal initial sounds for the male ancestor are Pa, Fa, Ba, and in a few instances Da and Ad, and once Od and Ta. In Asia Baba, Aba, Apa, and sometimes Ama occur; now what we want to know is the origin of these sounds, but here philology is silent with seemingly no power to advance. This is not the case, however, in regard to the objective roots of religion; here we work with reasoning creatures, and can see that the child continues, and that all mankind have ever continued to mate, whether in their own kind, or in their gods, the same A's, P's, F's, D's, to males, and M's, N's, Om's, Y's to females, and we therefore conclude that those were man's earliest symbols and names for the organs of sex, the Omphe or Mamma of the mother, which man had first cognisance of, and the A, Ab or Pa which he noticed as the characteristic of the opposite sex. The Assyrian often represented Ishtar as the upright fish, probably because of the fecundative powers of the fish, and as the creature _par excellence_ of water. The great mythic queen Semiramis, wife of Ninus, the founder of Nineveh or Ninus, was said to have sprung from a fish some twenty-three centuries B.C., and to be representative woman, Eva or Mary.