Few ships remain long enough to allow of passengers proceeding to the interior; where, however, they would find much to admire. At some of the farms they may be well accommodated, with the great advantage of finding their purses far less burthensome on their return! The famous vineyards of Stellenbosch are well worth seeing, as is the Salt Lake, which annually dries, leaving a bed of muriate of soda many miles in diameter, and of unknown depth! Surely, in parts accounted sterile, such a depôt of manure ought not to be overlooked. The hot baths, situate in a most romantic valley about forty miles from the Cape, demand the traveller’s attention. Whether he may proceed on horseback, (as I should recommend,) or in a waggon, a gun will be useful; both on account of the prodigious quantity of game, of every description, and as a defence against the numerous wild beasts which infest all the woody country beyond Hottentot Holland. I have been induced to enter upon the foregoing details regarding the Cape, from the consideration of its being intimately attached to our Asiatic possessions; and because so large a portion of those who visit them, touch there; either in going to, or when returning from, India. The political importance of a point so advantageously situated, and having such an expanse of territory annexed, may, perhaps, at some convenient moment, become a subject for future discussion: in the mean while, as connected with the Cape, I shall treat of St. Helena. This island is most singularly situated, being in the 16th degree of south latitude, and separated from the two continents of Africa and America by immense seas, in every part unfathomable: from the former it is about 1200 miles distant; from the latter about 1800. According to an analytic description, published in 1805, it appears tolerably certain, that Saint Helena owes its elevation above the sea to some great convulsion of nature; probably to, an earthquake: for it does not, like its neighbour Ascension, shew much remains of volcanic matter, neither does there appear any cavity at all resembling a crater. On the contrary, the whole island is composed of immense strata of rock, chiefly basaltic, which, from the variety of directions they assume, some declining one way, some another, while a few assume nearly a perpendicular tendency, may be supposed to have been disrupted, and ejected from the great sub-marine mass, by some tremendous earthquake. It would be difficult to form the least idea of the period when that event took place; nor, indeed, can it be altogether certified that this island was not coœval with the creation; since which it may have undergone various changes, from volcanic operations within the deep: the appearance of cinders without lava, and the regular intermixture of clay, especially of puzolana, with the rock, by such a gradual intercourse as to leave it undetermined where the one begins, and the