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; more than one hundred miles inland from the present sea-line.  The extension was called N[=a]r Marratum.  In Alexander’s time, the city of Charax (now Mohamra) was founded close to the sea (that was in the fourth century B.C.).  It is known from later histories, that shortly before the birth of our Saviour, the city was from fifty to one hundred and twenty Roman miles inland.  The change is due to the “Delta,” or alluvial formation at the mouth of the rivers.

Turning, then, to the recent inquiries (published in 1881[1]) by Professor Fried.  Delitzsch, it must be confessed that the results obtained are such as to completely avoid all the difficulties that beset the other explanations:  yet we ought not to be too confident that it is a final or absolute explanation.  A certain caution and reserve will still be wisely maintained on the subject.  At any rate, they show that an explanation, one that answers all the conditions of the problem, can be given; and that is a great thing.