TRIPOLY TO BENGAZI. 105 It is true that compared with high capes this elevation may appear to be trifling; but it seems quite sufficient when contrasted with the land about it, and particularly with the low and level surface of the Syrtis.

The highest parts of the Cape, as we have mentioned above, are not at the present time wooded, whatever they may have been formerly ; but the land at its base, to the south and south-east, is thickly covered with date-trees and olives : and, without allowing so much for the changes which time might be supposed to have produced, as would be readily granted to us by the most tenacious of naturalists, we may venture to assert that this cape, under its present appearance, answers sufficiently well to the description of Strabo, to authorize its being identified with the Cephalas.

The observations, however, which Signor Della Celia has made on the map of Northern Africa by Arrowsmith, respecting the extension of the Gharian chain towards the Greater Syrtis, and the omission of the low range which actually branches off from those mountains, are certainly very correct*. For a minor branch of the Gharian detaches itself from the chain, and runs down to the sea in the neighbourhood of Lebida; and another part of the same range extends itself from Lebida towards the Syrtis Major, gradually declining as it approaches that place, both of which are omitted in the * Sopra questa osservazione converra correggere la bellissima carta di Arrow-Smith, ove la schiera de’ monti del Goriano son disposti in maniera de far credere che tra il capo Mesurata, ove in quella carta si pretendono e la piccola Sirte, vi sia un’ ampia e non interrotta pianura. Ora, non solo da quest! monti si stacca un ramo che la interrompe, e viene a cadere scosceso sul mare a Lebda ; ma di piii, il loro prolungamento lino al Capo Mesurata falso. — (p. 53-4.)