of the New Testament where the power of evil is spoken of as a person, we may admit the influence of Persian ideas and Persian expressions, though even here strict proof is by no means easy. As to the serpent in Paradise, it is a conception that might have sprung up among the Jews as well as among the Brahmans; and the serpent that beguiled Eve seems hardly to invite comparison with the much grander conceptions of the terrible power of V_r_itra and Ahriman in the Veda and Avesta. Dr. Spiegel next discusses the similarity between the Garden of Eden and the Paradise of the Zoroastrians, and though he admits that here again he relies chiefly on the Bundehesh, a work of the Sassanian period, he maintains that that work may well be compared to Genesis, because it contains none but really ancient traditions. We do not for a moment deny that this may be so, but in a case like the present, where everything depends on exact dates, we decline to listen to such a plea. We value Dr. Spiegel's translations from the Bundehesh most highly, and we believe with him (p. 283) that there is little doubt as to the Pishon being the Indus, and the Gihon the Jaxartes. The identification, too, of the Persian river-name Ranha (the Vedic Rasâ) with the Araxes, the name given by Herodotus (i. 202) to the Jaxartes, seems very ingenious and well established. But we should still like to know why and in what language the Indus was first called Pishon, and the Jaxartes, or, it may be, the Oxus, Gihon. We next come to the two trees in the garden of Eden, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Dr. Windischmann has shown that the Iranians, too, were acquainted with two trees, one called Gaokerena, bearing the white Haoma, the other called the Painless tree. We are told first that these two trees are the same as the one fig tree out of which the Indians believe the world to have been created. Now, first of all, the Indians believed no such thing, and secondly, there is the same difference between one and two trees as there is between North and South. But we confess that until we know a good deal more about these two trees of the Iranians, we feel no inclination whatever to compare the Painless tree and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, though perhaps the white Haoma tree might remind us of the tree of life, considering that Haoma, as well as the Indian Soma, was supposed to give immortality to those who drank its juice. We likewise consider the comparison of the Cherubim who keep the way of the tree of life and the guardians of the Soma in the Veda and Avesta, as deserving attention, and we should like to see the etymological derivation of Cherubim from γρὑφες, Greifen, and of Seraphim from the Sanskrit sarpa, serpents, either confirmed or refuted.