imitive sculptors, who, unable to frame, by
their meagre principles of plastic art, a true image of the God whom they
adored, were content to substitute in its place a rude or scarcely
polished stone. Hence the Greeks, according to Pausanias, originally used
unhewn stones to represent their deities, thirty of which that historian
says he saw in the city of Pharas. These stones were of a cubical form,
and as the greater number of them were dedicated to the god Hermes, or
Mercury, they received the generic name of _Hermaa_. Subsequently, with
the improvement of the plastic art, the head was added.[227]

One of these consecrated stones was placed before the door of almost every
house in Athens. They were also placed in front of the temples, in the
gymnasia or schools, in libraries, and at the corners of streets, and in
the roads. When dedicated to the god Terminus they were used as landmarks,
and placed as such upon the concurrent lines of neighboring possessions.

The Thebans worshipped Bacchus under the form of a rude, square stone.

Arnobius[228] says that Cybele was represented by a small stone of a
black color. Eusebius cites Porphyry as saying that the ancients
represented the deity by a black stone, because his nature is obscure and
inscrutable. The reader will here be reminded of the black stone _Hadsjar
el Aswad_, placed in the south-west corner of the Kaaba at Mecca, which
was worshipped by the ancient Arabians, and is still treated with
religious veneration by the modern Mohammedans. The Mussulman priests,
however, say that it was originally white, and of such surprising splendor
that it could be seen at the distance of four days' journey, but that it
has been blackened by the tears of pilgrims.

The Druids, it is well known, had no other images of their gods but
cubical, or sometimes columnar, stones, of which Toland gives several
instances.

The Chaldeans had a sacred stone, which they held in great veneration,
under the name of _Mnizuris_, and to which they sacrificed for the purpose
of evoking the Good Demon.

Stone-worship existed among the early American races. Squier quotes
Skinner as asserting that the Peruvians used to set up rough stones in
their fields and plantations, which were worshipped as protectors of their
crops. And Gam a says that in Mexico the presiding god of the spring was
often represented without a human body, and in place thereof a pilaster or
square column, whose pedestal was cove