ON THE GARDEN OF EDEN. 99 
when subterranean convulsions have changed mountains 
into valleys and valleys into mountains, deserts into lakes 
and lakes into deserts.* 
It has been the fond desire of commentators, whose object 
it was to put a literal construction on the passage that “a 
river went out of Eden to water the garden,” to find two 
streams to correspond with the Pison and Gihon, which, 
together with the Tigris and Euphrates, formed a common 
origin; and thus the difficulty experienced in determining 
upon the exact spot has led many theologians and linguists 
to wander from the plain meaning of the narrative. 
Reland, Brugsch, and other writers have identified the 
Gihon with the Armenian Araxes, called by the Turks and 
Persians Aras, which rises at Erzeroom, and, after uniting 
with the Kyros, flows into the Caspian Sea. They make the 
Pison either the Phasis, which issues in the Caucasus and 
flows westward into the Black Sea, or the old Armenian 
Kyros, the present Kur, which rises westward of Kars. 
This last opinion, which was shared by Kurtz and Bunsen, 
was regarded by the late Dr. Franz Delitzsch, the father of 
the present Professor of Assyriology at Leipzig, as the most 
acceptable. 
The Araxes may or may not be a portion of one of the 
four rivers of Paradise, because in olden times the changes 
that took place in the courses of rivers through the effect of 
voleanic eruption and violent earthquake convulsions all 
over the world, as illustrated by geological research, might 
have happened in Armenia also and destroyed the common 
source of the four rivers and caused them to flow in different 
directions; but why the Phises or the Kyros, two insignificant 
rivers, have been chosen for the Pison when there are more 
important rivers in the neighbourhood is a puzzle to me. 
My own opinion is the two rivers mentioned in the second 
chapter of Genesis are now existing, though not in the same 
condition as they were when they first parted from one 
source, together with the Hiddekel and the Euphrates. The 
last-named river having been simply mentioned as the Prat, 
or Euphrates, without a distinctive peculiarity, indicates that 
it was well known to the Israelites, from their ancient asso- 
ciation with that great river through the emigration of 
Abraham and the sojourn of Jacob in Padan Aram. 
* Luther Clericus and others, and more recently Baumgarten, have 
inclined to the supposition that the flood had altered the course of the 
streams, and thus rendered it impossible to identify the locality of Eden 
from the description given in Genesis, 
