After the phonetic laws of each language had been more carefully elaborated, it was but too frequently forgotten that words have a history as well as a growth, and that the history of a word must be explored first, before an attempt is made to unravel its growth. Thus it was extremely tempting to derive _paradise_ from the Sanskrit +paradeśa+. The compound +para-deśa+ was supposed to mean the highest or a distant country, and all the rest seemed so evident as to require no further elucidation. +Paradeśa+, however, does not mean the highest or a distant country in Sanskrit, but is always used in the sense of a foreign country, an enemy’s country. Further, as early as the Song of Solomon (iv. 13), the word occurs in Hebrew as _pardés_, and how it could have got there straight from Sanskrit requires, at all events, some historical explanation. In Hebrew the word might have been borrowed from Persian, but the Sanskrit word +paradeśa+, if it existed at all in Persian, would have been _paradaesa_, the _s_ being a guttural, not a dental sibilant. Such a compound, however, does not exist in Persian, and therefore the Sanskrit word +paradeśa+ could not have reached Hebrew _viâ_ Persia. It is true, nevertheless, that the ancient Hebrew word _pardés_ is borrowed from Persian, viz.: from the Zend _pairidaêza_, which means _circumvallatio_, a piece of ground inclosed by high walls, afterwards a park, a garden.[11] The root in Sanskrit is DIH or DHIH (for Sanskrit _h_ is Zend _z_), and means originally to knead, to squeeze together, to shape. From it we have the Sanskrit +dehî+, a wall, while in Greek the same root, according to the strictest phonetic rules, yielded τοῖχος, wall. In Latin our root is regularly changed into _fig_, and gives us _figulus_, a potter, _figura_, form or shape, and _fingere_. In Gothic it could only appear as _deig-an_, to knead, to form anything out of soft substances; hence _daig-s_, the English _dough_, German _Deich_. But the Greek παράδεισος did not come from Hebrew, because here again there is no historical bridge between the two languages. In Greek we trace the word to Xenophon, who brought it back from his repeated journeys in Persia, and who uses it in the sense of pleasure-ground, or deer park.[12] Lastly, we find the same word used in the LXX., as the name given to the garden of Eden, the word having been borrowed either a third time from Persia, or taken from the Greek, and indirectly from the works of Xenophon. This is the real history of the word. It is an Aryan word, but it does not exist in Sanskrit. It was first formed in Zend, transferred from thence as a foreign word into Hebrew and again into Greek. Its modern Persian form is _firdaus_. All this is matter of history rather than philology. Yet we read in one of the best classical dictionaries: “The root of παράδεισος appears to be Semitic, Arab. _firdaus_, Hebr. _pardês_: borrowed, also, in Sanskrit +paradêśa+.”[13] Nearly every word is wrong.