Like other nations of ancient times, the Arabs invested certain trees with a sacred character, a custom indicative of the lingering influence of phallicism; a worship whose original principles, long forgotten in the Peninsula, survived only in the exhibition of its peculiar emblems and in the practice of a gross and shameless immorality. Among the Pagan Arabs, no form of superstition was too debasing to claim its votaries. They raised altars to fire. They attributed supernatural powers to the crocodile and the serpent. Each tent had its image; every hovel of sun-dried bricks was filled with tutelary deities. Shapeless masses of stone, which tradition had associated with remarkable events or endowed with celestial origin, were approached with a reverence not vouchsafed to idols of the most costly materials and elaborate workmanship. Of these blocks, which partook of the nature of the fetich, the black were sacred to the Sun, the white to the Moon. In the Pagan world two of the former were especially famous; over one was erected a splendid temple on the mountain near Emesa in Syria, whence the infamous Roman emperor Heliogabalus derived his name; the other was built into the wall of the Kaaba of Mecca. The latter was the most remarkable object of the kind known to antiquity. A plain fragment of basalt, seven inches in diameter, whose composition is apparently identical with that of a neighboring mountain, it had acquired, in the eyes of the people of Arabia, a sanctity not shared by any other emblem of idolatrous worship. It was probably, in its origin, a phallic symbol, and stood alone in an open square of the city, ages preceding the building of the Kaaba, an event which tradition has assigned to a date four hundred years before the foundation of the temple of Solomon. Thus invested with the sanction of immemorial prescription and the virtues of a miraculous relic, it has received the reverent homage of millions upon millions of idolaters and Moslems. It has survived the accidents of conquest, of iconoclasm, of conflagration. The silver bands which unite its fragments bear witness to the vicissitudes and rough usage to which it has been subjected. The healing power it was supposed to possess attracted the sick and the disabled from regions far beyond the limits of Arabia. It was the starting-point of ceremonial and pilgrimage. It imparted its virtues to the Kaaba, that temple where alone, in all the Peninsula, hereditary feuds were suspended; where violence was forgotten; where rudeness gave way to courtesy; where the temporary surrender of individual freedom, and the voluntary relinquishment of tribal animosity, seemed to announce the existence of national sentiment and the possibility of national union. The recognition by Mohammed of the claims of the Black Stone and the Kaaba--the ancient temple of Saturn--to public veneration, in a creed otherwise uncompromisingly hostile to idolatry, demonstrated