BENGAZI. 331 never received as historical facts. The disappearance of the Lathon, and its subsequent rise, might have been equally a poetical fiction ; but when we find, in the country in which it was placed, a large body of water which actually loses itself, we are naturally led to believe one part of the assertion, and to seek to identify the actual subterranean stream with that which is said to have existed. On a reference to the authority of geographers and historians, we find a river called Lathon laid down very clearly in the place where this body of water is found, and we remark that the name which they apply to the river signifies hidden or concealed. So far there is a probabihty that the Lathon of the ancients and the subterranean stream in the neighbourhood of Bengazi may be one and the same river.

Again, we are told, on the authority of Strabo, that the Lathon discharged itself into the Harbour of the Hesperides ; and w e find a small spring actually running into the lake which is connected with the harbour in question ; and which might, from the position of the subterranean spring between it and the mountains to the southward of it, have received at least a portion of the waters, which lose themselves in a place where the level is higher. When we find that the Lathon (or hidden stream) of Bengazi is directly between the mountains and the harbour, it becomes the more probable that such a communication may have existed ; and whether the little spring which runs into the lake be a continuation of the Lathon or not, there appears to be quite sufficient reason for believing that the ancients might have imagined it was. If we consider how trifling 2 U 2