The name "Paradise" appears to have been derived from the Persian, in which it means a garden; similarly derived words express the same idea in other languages; as in the Hebrew _pardes_, in the Arabian _firdaus_, in the Syriac _pardiso_, and in the Armenian _partes_. It has been thought that the Persian word itself is derived from the Sanscrit _pradesa_, or _paradesa_, which means a circle, a country, or strange region; which, though near enough as to sound, does not quite agree as to meaning. "Eden" is from a Hebrew root meaning delights. CHAPTER XII. ECLIPSES AND COMETS. We have seen in the earlier chapters on the systems of the ancients and their ideas of the world how everything was once supposed to have exclusive reference to man, and how he considered himself not only chief of animate objects, but that his own city was the centre of the material world, and his own world the centre of the material universe; that the sun was made to shine, as well as the moon and stars, for his benefit; and that, were it not for him they would have no reason for existence. And we have seen how, step by step, these illusions have been dispelled, and he has learnt to appreciate his own littleness in proportion as he has realised the immensity of the universe of which he forms part. If such has been his history, and such his former ideas on the regular parts, as we may call them, of nature, much more have similar ideas been developed in relation to those other phenomena which, coming at such long intervals, have not been recognised by him as periodic, but have seemed to have some relation to mundane affairs, often of the smallest consequence. Such are eclipses of the sun and moon, comets, shooting-stars, and meteors. Among the less instructed of men, even when astronomers of the same age and nation knew their real nature, eclipses have always been looked upon as something ominous of evil.