But neither of these attempts has been successful: the first must, indeed, be absolutely dismissed; because the Hebrew phrases used in describing the four _branches_ of the river that "went out," and watered the garden, and then parted, cannot be applied to four independent sources or streams--_upstream_ of the Euphrates. It will not, then, satisfy the problem, to find four rivers somewhere in the vicinity of the Euphrates, and which, in a general way, enclose a district in which Eden might be placed. 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, Jíkhún, 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-nîl." 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. [Footnote 1: And it is astonishing to find the error generally perpetuated in maps attached to modern Bibles.] [Footnote 2: As distinct from a real philological connection of a modern name with a more ancient one, and so forth.] Turning now to the second of the two theories, the identification of the site on the lower part of the Euphrates after its now existing junction with the Tigris (and which the supporters of the theory have justified by making the Gihon and Pison two rivers coming from Eden) must also be set aside.