This celebrated retreat is stated by Scylax to have been an inclosed spot of about one-fifth of a British mile[18] across, each way, filled with thickly-planted fruit-trees of various kinds, and _inaccessible_ on all sides. It was situated (on the authority of the same writer) at six hundred and twenty stadia (or fifty geographical miles) from the _Port of Barce_; and this distance agrees precisely with that of the places here alluded to from Ptolemeta, the port intended by Scylax, as will be seen by a reference to the chart. The testimony of Pliny is also very decided in fixing the site of the Hesperides in the neighbourhood of Berenice. “Not far” (he says) “from the city” (Berenice is here meant) “is the river Lethon, and the sacred grove where the gardens of the Hesperides are said to be situated[19].” Ptolemy also may be supposed to intend the same position, when he informs us, that the garden was to the westward of the people of Barca; or, what is the same thing, that the Barcitæ were to the eastward of the garden of Hesperides[20]. The name, indeed, itself of Hesperides would induce us to place the Garden, so called, in the vicinity of Bengazi; for the Hesperides were the early inhabitants of that part of the Cyrenaica, and Hesperis, as we have already stated, was the ancient name of the city of Berenice, on the site of which Bengazi is built,[21] and which was probably so called by the Greeks, from the circumstance of its being the most western city of the district. It has been supposed by Gosselin[22] and others, that those celebrated gardens of early times (for they are frequently mentioned in the plural) were nothing more than some of those Oases, or verdant islands, “which reared their heads amid the sandy desert;” and, in the absence of positive local information, the conjecture was sufficiently reasonable.