John Louis Yanoski was born at Lons-le-Saulnier, France, March 9, 1813, and died at Paris early in February last. Though not known much out of his own country, few literary men have possessed more admirable and substantial qualities. He was feeble in bodily powers, but endowed with indefatigable ardor in the pursuit of intellectual objects, and a mind at once penetrating and judicious. He was educated in the College of Versailles. In 1836 he became a tutor in history at the University at Paris. Subsequently he was selected by Thierry to assist in the preparation of his history of the Tiers-Etat, and spent four years in working upon it. At the same time he labored assiduously in other directions. In 1839 he gained two prizes from the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, one for a memoir on the organization of the national forces from the twelfth century to the reign of Charles VII; the other for an essay on the abolition of slavery in antiquity. In 1841 the Academy selected him to prepare, under the direction of M. Mignet, a view of the progress of the moral and political sciences, a work which was not completed when he died. In 1840 he was made professor of history in Stanislas College; in 1842 Michelet chose him for his substitute at the College of France, but in that capacity he gave but a single lecture, being seized while speaking with hemorrhage of the lungs, from which he did not recover for several months. Notwithstanding the labors required by all these occupations he found time to write for Didot's Univers Pittoresque a history of Carthage from the second Punic war to the Vandal invasion, a history of the Vandal rule and the Byzantine restoration, another of the African Church, and one of the Church of Ancient Syria. He also furnished many important articles to the Encyclopedic Dictionary, wrote often for the National newspaper, and for two years was chief editor of the Nouvelle Revue Encyclopédique. He was a republican in sentiment, and a character of exceeding nobleness and energy.
Colonel Count d'Hozier, a distinguished French officer, who was compromised in the affair of Georges Cadoudal, died early in March, in Paris, aged seventy-seven. On the occasion of the conspiracy referred to, he was sentenced to death, but obtained his pardon through the interference of the Empress Josephine, and as a commutation of his punishment was imprisoned until the year 1814 in the prison of the Chateau d'If—the scene of the confinement of Dumas' hero, the Comte de Montechristo.
M. George Brentano, the oldest banker at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, died a few weeks ago, aged eighty-eight. He was brother of two persons well known in the world of letters, M. Clement Brentano and the Countess Bettina d'Arnim, the correspondent of Goëthe.
Frederic Xavier Fernbach, the inventor of that mode of encaustic painting which is called by his name, died at Munich on the 27th February. A history of his experiments and inventions was published many years ago.
M. Jules Martien, author of a volume on Christianity in America, died in Paris on the twenty-first of March.