Note 201 — Chapter XV

The original sacred image, which was preserved inside a screen or curtain in the inmost temple, was a shapeless mass of wood something like the prehistoric blocks of wood or stone which were esteemed at Athens and elsewhere the most venerable images of their favourite deities: see Pausanias, Description of Greece, i. 26. The legend at Ephesus was just the same as at Athens and elsewhere, that these prehistoric images had fallen down from heaven. Some of them may have been aerolites.