"The ox is indeed the companion and fellow labourer of man and the minister of Ceres: wherefore the ancients, holding him inviolable, made it a capital offence to kill an ox.

Labor that does not engage the mind has no dignity; else the ox and the ass are kings in the world, and we are but younger brothers in the royal family.

An ox was almost a sacred beast in Damara-Land, not to be killed except on momentous occasions, and then as a sort of sacrificial feast, in which all bystanders shared.

He began when the ox was a tiny calf to carry it a mile every day, and the increase of weight was so gradual that he did not feel it; his arms became used to the weight, and as the ox grew bigger, he at the same time grew stronger.

Therefore, a good fore-ox is an animal of an exceptionally independent disposition.

The ox is a symbol of the Saracens, who subdued Palestine; the butcher that killed the ox denotes the crusaders by whom the Holy Land was taken from the Saracens; the Angel of Death the Turkish power to which Palestine is still subject.

A wild ox shall be thy hiding-place.