Apollo visits a fair maid of Athens, and a Plato is ushered into the
world.

In ancient Mexico, as well as in Babylonia, and in modern Corea, as in
modern Palestine, as in the legends of all lands, virgins gave birth
and became divine mothers. [Footnote: Stories of Virgin Births.
Reference: Lord Macartney. Voyage dans 'interview de la Chine et en
Tartarie. Vol. I, P. 48. See also Les Vierges Meres et les Naissance
Miraculeuse. P. Saintyves. P. 19, etc.]

But the real home of virgin births is the land of the Nile. Eighteen
hundred years before Christ, we find carved on one of the walls of the
great temple of Luxor a picture of the _annunciation, conception and
birth_ of King Amunothph III, an almost exact copy of the
annunciation, conception and birth of the Christian God. Of course no
one will think of maintaining that the Egyptians borrowed the idea
from the Catholics nearly two thousand years before the Christian era.
"The story in the Gospel of Luke, the first and second chapters is,
"says Malvert, "a reproduction, 'point by point,' of the story in
stone of the miraculous birth of Amunothph." [Footnote: Science and
Religion P. 96.]

[Illustration: The Annunciation, Birth, and Adoration of Amenophis of
Egypt, Nearly 2000 Years Before Christ.]

Sharpe in his Egyptian Mythology, page 19, gives the following
description of the Luxor picture, quoted by G. W. Foote in his _Bible
Romances,_ page 126: "In this picture we have the annunciation, the
conception, the birth and the adoration, as described in the first and
second chapters of Luke's Gospel." Massey gives a more minute