If we recollect that the stone pillar was often identified with the ancestor or father, the reason for this idea will not perhaps be quite so hard to understand. “From these stones we are all descended,” thinks the primitive worshipper: “these are our fathers; therefore, they are the givers of children, the producers and begetters of all our generations, the principle of fertility, the proper gods to whom to pray for offspring.” Add that many of them, being represented as human, or human in their upper part at least, grow in time to be ithyphallic, like Priapus, party by mere grotesque barbarism, but partly also as a sign of the sex of the deceased: and we can see the naturalness of this easy transition. From the Hermæ of the Greeks to the rude phallic deities of so many existing savage races, we get everywhere signs of this constant connexion between the sacred stone and the idea of paternity. Where the stone represents the grave of a woman, the deity of course is conceived as a goddess, but with {196}the same implications. Herodotus saw in Syria stelæ engraved with the female pudenda. The upright stone god is thus everywhere and always liable to be regarded as a god of fruitfulness. But did this idea of the stone pillar extend to Palestine and to the Semitic nations? There is evidence that it did, besides that of Herodotus. Major Conder, whose opinion on all questions of pure archaeology (as opposed to philology) deserves the highest respect, says of Canaanitish times, “The menhir, or conical stone, was the emblem throughout Syria of the gods presiding over fertility, and the cup hollows which have been formed in menhirs and dolmens are the indications of libations, often of human blood, once poured on these stones by early worshippers.” He connects these monuments with the linga cult of India, and adds that Dr. Chaplin has found such a cult still surviving near the Sea of Galilee. Lucian speaks of the two great pillars at the temple of Hierapolis as _phalli_. Of the Phoenicians Major Conder writes: “The chief emblem worshipped in the temples was a pillar or cone, derived no doubt from the rude menhirs which were worshipped by early savage tribes, such as Dravidians, Arabs, Celts, and Hottentots.” That they were originally sepulchral in character we can gather from the fact that “they often stood beneath trilithons or dolmens, or were placed before an altar made by a stone laid flat on an upright base.” “The representations on early Babylonian cylinders of tables whereon a small fire might be kindled, or an offering of some small object laid, seem to indicate a derivation from similar structures. The original temple in which the cone and its shrine, or its altar, were placed, was but a cromlech or enclosure, square or round, made by setting up stones.” Remains of such enclosures, with dolmens on one side, are found at various spots in Moab and Phoenicia. Nothing could be more obviously sepulchral in character than these rude shrines