ON THE GARDEN OF EDEN. 87 
was situated in the third region of the air, and was higher 
than all the mountains of the earth by twenty cubits, so that 
the waters of the flood could not reach it. 
‘ a Habraeus regarded it as a description of the human 
ody. 
Of recent writers upon the same topic Major William 
Sterling believed in the idea, which he published in 1855, 
that Malwa in India was the site of Paradise and that the lost 
rivers, the Pison and the Gihon, were the Nerbudda and the 
Taptee. That the land between these two rivers, resembling 
Mesopotamia, was Abraham’s country ! * 
The latest and mest quaint theory regarding the site of the 
Garden of Eden was promulgated by no less a distinguished 
personage than the lamented General Charles George Gordon, 
of China and Khartoom renown. He harboured the idea that 
the Seychelles was the place where Adam ate of the forbidden 
fruit, which he considered to be the “ Caco-de-Mer,” or the 
double cocoa-nut, that abounds on those islands. This 
strange discovery has been noticed in the Universal Review, 
and it may not be uninteresting if I quote a few passages of 
the article bearing on the point. The writer says:— 
“ The discovery was that of the identity of the Seychelles 
Islands with the Garden of Eden, and the evidence of which 
he (Gordon) sought to prove it was the chart of the Islands, 
the correspondence of the four rivers mentioned in the Bible 
with those of the Seychelles, and the identification of the 
‘Caco-de Mer, or double cocoa-nut, with the forbidden fruit 
by which our first parents fell, 
“ Tt is easy to laugh or sneer at such a theory ; it comes, it 
may be, a hundred, or so, years too late; but there is little 
that is really laughable therein when we consider that the 
man (Gordon) would fight and prevail, secure in his religious 
belief, against the most overwhelming odds; that he inspired 
such confidence and trust in his men that those he led were 
almost invincible; that he did justice and hated imiquity 
throughout his life; that he left his name as one vf the 
proudest ; that he died in a last supreme unselfish effort. 
« That he should have dreamt, in one of the brief resting- 
spaces of his life, this dream of having found man’s first 
habitation and the cause and manner of man’s first sin, in 
these strange far-away Islands of the Seychelles, is but one 
* The Rivers of Paradise and the Children of Shem, by Major William 
Sterling. Rivington : London. 
H 
