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 subterra- 
nean stream with that which is said to have existed. On a refer- 
ence 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 subter- 
ranean 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 them- 
selves in a place where the level is higher. When we find that the 
Lathon (or hidden stream) of Bengazi is directly between the moun- 
tains 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 
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