The accounts which have come down to us of the _desert of Barca_, from the pens of the Arab Historians, would lead us to suppose that the country so called (which included not only the territory in question, with the whole of the Pentapolis and Cyrenaica, but also the whole tract of coast between Tripoly and Alexandria) was little more than a barren tract of sand, scarcely capable of cultivation. Under such an impression, we can readily imagine that modern writers might be easily deceived; and when it was necessary to fix the site of groves and gardens in the country so erroneously described, we may certainly justify them in looking for such places in the only parts of a sandy desert where luxuriant vegetation is found, the Oases, or verdant islands alluded to. “Objects here presented themselves” (says the learned and ingenious Author of the Discoveries and Travels in Africa, in speaking of the western coast of that country, where the Hesperides have by some writers been placed) “which acted powerfully on the exalted and poetical imaginations of the ancients. They were particularly struck by those Oases, or verdant islands, which reared their heads amid the sandy desert. Hence, doubtless, were drawn those brilliant pictures of the Hesperian gardens, the Fortunate Islands, the Islands of the Blest, which are painted in such glowing colours, and form the gayest part of ancient mythology. The precise position of these celebrated spots has been a subject of eager and doubtful inquiry. The chief difficulty is, that there are different points of the continent in which they seem to be fixed with almost equal precision. In fact, it seems clearly shewn, by some learned writers[23], that this variety of position is referrible, not to any precise geographical _data_, but to the operation of certain secret propensities that are deeply lodged in the human breast.”