There is no deficiency of evidence respecting the worship of the ox in Egypt. Strabo says one was kept at Memphis, which was regarded as a divinity. Pliny repeats the story and says that the Egyptians called this ox Apis, and that it had two kinds of temples, the entrance to one being most pleasant, to the other frightful. Herodotus says of this idol:--"Apis or Epatus, is a calf from a cow which never produced but one, and this could only have been by a clap of thunder. The calf denominated Apis, has certain marks by which it may be known. It is all over black, excepting one square mark; on its back is the figure of an eagle, and on its tongue that of a beetle." It certainly seems tolerably clear that the worship of the calf came out of Egypt, but so much difficulty surrounds the question of whether the Egyptian worship preceded or followed that of Aaron's calf, that we are inclined to endorse the opinion of a modern writer, and say we suspend our judgment respecting the precise motive which determined Aaron to set up a calf as the object of Israelitish worship, and conclude that had he offered any other object of worship, whether some other animal, or any plant, or a star, or any other production of nature, the learned would have asked, "Why this rather than some other?" Many would have been the divisions of opinion on the question; each one would have found in antiquity, and in the nature of the case, probabilities to support his own sentiment, and perhaps have exalted them into demonstrations.[16] The mention of a cone in connection with the matter now under consideration, and as the form of Aaron's idol, suggests other examples of the same figure which are said to have had a phallic form. The Paphian Venus, for instance, was represented by a conical stone: of which Tacitus thus speaks:--"The statue of the goddess bears no resemblance to the human form. It is round throughout, broad at one end, and gradually tapering to a narrow span at the other, like a goat; the reason of this is not ascertained. The cause is stated by Philostratus to be symbolic." Lajard (_Recherches sur la Cult de Venus_) says:--"In all Cyrian coins, from Augustus to Macrinus, may be seen in the place where we should anticipate to find a statue of the goddess, the form of a conical stone. The same is placed between two cypresses under the portico of the temple of Astarte, in a medal of Aelia Capitolina; but in this instance the cone is crowned. In another medal, struck by the elder Philip, Venus is represented between two Genii, each of whom stands upon a cone or pillar with a rounded top. There is reason to believe that at Paphos images of the conical stone were made and sold as largely as were effigies of Diana of the Ephesians. "Medals and engraved stones demonstrate that the hieratic prescriptions required that all those hills which were consecrated to Jupiter should be represented in a conical form. At Sicony, Jupiter was adored under the form of a pyramid."