nor windy, hazy, nor serene, than at other times. During the same year, while sailing in an Algerine cruiser of fifty guns towards Cape Bona, he felt an earthquake at sea, which produced so prodigious a concussion in the ship, that at each shock a weight of twenty or thirty tons appeared to have fallen from a vast height upon the ballast. At this time they were five leagues to the south of the Seven Capes, and could not reach ground with a line of two hundred fathoms.
In the year 1727 he visited the kingdom of Tunis, which was not, he observes, divided, like Algiers, into provinces, governed each by a provincial bey, but was wholly under the immediate inspection of the bey, who annually made the circuit of his dominions with a flying camp, and collected the tribute. The seacoast, the Zeugitania of the ancients, was more thickly inhabited, and exhibited more contentment, prosperity, and other marks of good government than any portion of the neighbouring kingdom. Upon arriving at Biserta, Utica, and the ruins of Carthage, Dr. Shaw throws open the floodgates of his learning, in endeavouring to determine the extent of the encroachments made by the mud of the Bagrada upon the sea, the site of the little city which Cato rendered illustrious by his death, and the circumference and topography of Dido's capital. Bochart, with a still greater luxuriance of quotation, had, by comparing the testimony of the ancients, determined its circumference to have been nearly forty-five miles; but according to Dr. Shaw, the peninsula upon which it stood does not much exceed thirty miles in circumference, and the city, he thinks, could never lay claim to above half that extent. However, as at the beginning of the Punic war the number of its inhabitants is said to have amounted to seven hundred thousand, while it was pronounced by Suidas the largest and most powerful city upon earth, I cannot believe it to have been no more
