is country was laid on the extreme north of Armenia;
all this without a particle of evidence of any kind.[1] I may here take
the opportunity of remarking that a chance _similarity of names_[2] has
been, throughout the controversy, a fruitful source of enlarged
speculative wandering. Thus this name Gihon (Gaihun, Jikhun, G[=e][=o]n,
&c.) that appears in North Armenia, again appears in connection with the
_Nile_; while again the name "Nile" has wandered back to the confines of
Persia, and one of the _Euphrates_ branches is still called
"Shatt-en-nil." The ancients, indeed, had very curious ideas about the
Nile. Its real sources being so long undiscovered--no Speke or Grant
having appeared--imagination ran wild on the subject. Not only so, but
it is remarkable that the name _Cush_ should have acquired both a
Persian Gulf and an Egyptian employment: and the writer of the able
article in "The Nineteenth Century" (October, 1882) points out several
other singular instances in which names are common both to the
African-Egyptian region, and to this.

[Footnote 1: And it is astonishing to find the error generally
perpetuated in maps attached to modern Bibles.]

[Footnote 2: As distinct from a real philological connection of a modern
name with a more ancient one, and so forth.]

Turning now to the second of the two theories, the identification of the
site on the lower part of the Euphrates after its now existing junction
with the Tigris (and which the supporters of the theory have justified
by making the Gihon and Pison two rivers coming from Eden) must also be
set aside.

For the important fact has been overlooked that it is quite certain,
that anciently, the joint stream, (Shatt-el-'Arab), as it now is, did
not exist. Though the Genesis narrative tells us of a junction
_immediately outside_ the southern boundary of the Garden, the Euphrates
channels and the Tigris branch (with part of the Euphrates water in it)
flowed separately to the Persian Gulf. It is quite certain that, in the
time of Alexander the Great, the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris were
a good day's journey apart. For this separate outflow there is the
incontestable evidence of Pliny and other authors quoted by Professor
Delitzsch. I may here also remark, that anciently the Persian Gulf
extended much farther inland than it does now. In the time of
Sennacherib, an inland arm of the sea extended so far, that a _naval_
expedition against Elam was possible; mo