s 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 Rasa)
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 [Greek: gryphes], Greifen, and of Seraphim
from the Sanskrit sarpa, serpents, either confirmed or refuted.

The Deluge is not mentioned in the sacred writings of the
Zoroastrians, nor in the hymns of the Rig-veda. It is mentioned,
however, in one of the latest Brahma_n_as, and the carefully balanced
arguments of Burnouf, who considered the tradition of the Deluge as
borrowed by the Indians from Semitic neighbours, seem to us to be
strengthened, rather than weakened, by the isolated appearance of the
story of the Deluge in this one passage out of the whole of the Vedic
literature. Nothing, however, has yet been pointed out to force us to
admit a Semitic origin for the story of the Flood, as told in the
_S_atapatha-brahma_n_a, and afterwards repeated in the Mahabharata and
the Pura_