Both Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, as noticed by Gyraldus, though speaking of the phallus, fail to explain its precise nature and form. Mr. Payne Knight in his “Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology,” says:—“In Egypt and all over Asia, the mystic and symbolical worship appears to have been of immemorial antiquity. The women of the former country carried images of Osiris in their sacred processions, with a movable phallus of disproportionate magnitude, the reason for which Herodotus does not think proper to relate, because it belonged to the mystic religion. Diodorus Siculus, however, who lived in a more communicative age, informs us that it signified the generative attribute; and Plutarch, that the Egyptian statues of Osiris had the phallus to signify his procreative and prolific power, the extension of which through the three elements of air, earth and water, they expressed by another kind of statue, which was occasionally carried in procession, having a triple symbol of the same attribute. The Greeks usually represented the phallus alone, as a distinct symbol, the meaning of which seems to have been among the last discoveries revealed to the initiated. It was the same, in emblematical writing, as the Orphic epithet, _Pan-genetor, universal generator_, in which sense it is still employed by the Hindus.” Herodotus, in allusion to the above, says:—“To Bacchus, on the eve of his feast, every Egyptian sacrifices a hog before the door of his house, which is then given back to the swineherd by whom it was furnished, and by him carried away. In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that the Egyptians have no choral dances. They also use, instead of phalli, another invention, consisting of images a cubit high, pulled by strings, which the women carry round to the villages. A piper goes in front; and the women follow, singing hymns in honour of Bacchus. They give a religious reason for the peculiarities of the image.” Payne Knight supports his statement relative to the discovery of the meaning of the symbol by a quotation from Tertullian: Concerning the Valentinians (a sect of Ophites or of Gnostics) “After many sighings of the seers, the entire sealing of the tongue (from divulging it) an image of the virile organ is revealed.” This opinion, however, has been pronounced by others as extremely questionable; “but were it admitted,” says Colonel Kennedy, “it seems indisputable that the phallus was always formed in such a manner as to leave no doubt with respect to the object which it represented, and that in religious processions it was always attached to a human figure. It hence appears evident that the phallus bore no similarity to the lingam, and that, though the causes which may originally have produced the worship of these objects may have been the same in Egypt and India, still the symbols adopted for their representation, and the adoration paid to