The third branch was Hiddekel, the _Diklatu_ of the Arabs, the Tigra of the old Persians, and the _Tigris_ of later writers. This is said to run eastward towards Assyria.[1] The fourth river was the Frat or Euphrates. Observe, in passing, that the author gives no detail about the great river Euphrates, as being well known; while he adds particulars about the Tigris, and describes the Gihon and the Pison in some detail. [Footnote 1: So the margin of the A. and R. Versions more correctly.] Now it will at once strike the reader that two of these rivers are well known to the present day. The others are not. It is in the identification of these two, and of the districts which they "compassed," which form the difficulties of the problem. Up till recent times, it is remarkable what a variety of speculations have been attempted as to the situation of Eden. Dr. Aldis Wright, the learned author of the article "Eden" in Smith's "Biblical Dictionary," remarks: "It would be difficult, in the whole history of opinion, to find any subject which has so invited, and at the same time completely baffled, conjecture, as the Garden of Eden." And in another place he thinks that "the site of Eden will ever rank with the quadrature of the circle, and the interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy among those unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, problems which possess so strange a fascination." It is, however, to be remarked, (1)that all that was written before Professor Delitzsch's researches were made known; and (2)that really a great mass of the conjecture and speculation has been purely in the air--undertaken without any reference to the plain terms of the text to be interpreted. It is the extravagance of commentators, and their insisting on going beyond the narrative itself, that has raised such difficulties, and made the problem look more hopeless than it really is. To what purpose are "the three continents of the old world" "subjected to the most rigorous search," as Dr. Wright puts it--when it is quite plain from the text itself, that the solution is to be sought in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates, or not at all? The whole inquiry seems to have been one in which a vast cloud of learned dust has been raised by speculators, who began their inquiry without clearly determining, to start with, what was the point at issue. Either the description in Gen. ii. 3-14 is meant for allegory, or geographical fact: this question must first be settled; and if the latter is agreed to, then it is quite inconceivable that the words should imply any very extensive region, or any fancied realm extending over a large proportion of one or other quarter of the globe. The problem is then at once narrowed; and it is simply unreasonable to look for Havila in India, or for Pison in the province of Burma, as one learned author does!