Mr. Ayrton also (in the Athenæum, No. MLXI.), steps into the lists for M. D’Abbadie. Notwithstanding his learned attempt to fix etymologically the situation of the source-territory of the Nile by a fortuitous coincidence of words according to a previous plan of D’Abbadie, I cannot assent to his views. If the inhabitants of the coast of the Red Sea first navigated this Stream, as naturally would be the case, and the Sabæans, from Arabia, conquered Habesh in the time of Solomon, the latter colony might still have remained their principal commercial settlement on the coast, and even have been planted long before their immigrations from Asia. The dialect of the Ethiopians, which we still recognise to belong to the Semitic languages, announces that there was a communication with these maritime countries before the period of history: yet, commerce on the coast of Habesh might perhaps only have remained a coasting-trade; for history hands down to posterity merely the fact, that the Arabs made journeys to China, and that the Nabathæans brought Indian goods and asphalt on their camels to the Egyptian market at the time of Alexander the Great,—the latter article being fished up from the Red Sea. It is improbable that the Sabæans, who were very well known under the successors of Alexander, extended into the Ethiopian highlands their colonies in Habesh, where even now the Arabic language only prevails on parts of the coast, in commercial intercourse. It is very unlikely, also, that they have given the name of “Mountains of the Moon” to a region; because such a change of a local name, which was certainly imposed upon that country beforehand, pre-supposes a regular Sabæan colony on the spot, whose idiom might perhaps be discovered in a different way than by the solitary word “Gamarö,” or “Gimirö;” for we might derive this as well from “Gimri,” or “Gumri,” (turtle-doves), as I have heard also somewhere in the Desert the name of “Gebel Gimri.” It seems to me, therefore, that it is rather too daring to wish to identify this expression,—according to Abbadie, “Gamru,” or “Gmura,” with the Arabic “Kamar.” But if these parts, so remarkable on account of the sources of the Nile, had been known in the ancient times, the Egyptian priests and Herodotus, or most certainly the later Greeks, would have learned something of them.