It may, indeed, be doubted whether this first
attempt (which I may call the "North Armenian solution") would ever have
been seriously entertained, but from the fact that the name Gihon--or
something very like it--did attach itself to the Araxes or Phasis, a
considerable river of Armenia. Finding a Gihon ready, the commentators
next made the Pison, the Acampsis; and then as Pison was near the
"Havila land," this 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.
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