The French papers report the death, at Moscow, of M. de Saint Priest—a member of the French Academy, formerly a Peer of France—and the author of several historical works.
Dr. Paul Erman, the Nestor of Prussian savans, died recently at Berlin, at the advanced age of eighty-seven. In addition to innumerable articles on different subjects in scientific periodicals, he published important works on electricity, galvanism, magnetism, physiology, and optics.
The Continental papers report the death, at Jena, of Professor Wolff.—Professor Humbert, of the Academy of Geneva, a distinguished Orientalist, and author of many learned works, is also reported to have died, on the 19th of last month.
MR. POTTS’S NEW YEAR’S.
Mr. T. Pemberton Potts—thus he always wrote his name, though the “Family Record,” which sets forth the genesis of the house of Potts, does not contain the sonorous trisyllable which follows the modest initial T., which is all that he ever acknowledges of his baptismal appellation of Timothy—Mr. Potts had been in great tribulation all day, in the apprehension that hatter, or tailor, or bootmaker would fail to send home the articles of their craft in which he proposed to make a sensation in his to-morrow’s “New-Year’s Calls.” But his apprehensions were groundless. For a wonder, all these artists kept their word; and the last installment arrived fully two hours before the Old Year had taken its place in the silent and irrevocable Past. As one by one came in the brilliant beaver, the exquisite paletot, the unimpeachable swallow-tail, the snowy vest, the delicate, pearl-gray “continuations,” and the resplendent boots, which Cinderella might have assumed, had she lived in the days of “Bloomerism,” Mr. Potts displayed them scientifically over a chair, and gazed upon the picture they presented, as fondly as painter ever gazed upon the canvas upon which he had flung his whole burning soul.
