and in
the evening, after a song, a pupil placed a green wreath upon
the master's head.

"Two months after this he died peacefully. One of his strongest
peculiarities was his passionate love for flowers, and during
his illness he repeatedly commended the care of his flowers to
his friends. He had the window opened frequently, so he could
gaze once more on the out-door scenes he loved so well. Almost
his last words were: 'Nature, pure, vigorous Nature!'"

JOHN FITCH, the inventor of steamboats, was even less fortunate than
Froebel. No patron took him by the hand, and although his invention
was successfully demonstrated at Philadelphia in 1787, by a small
steamboat, the trial being witnessed by the members of the convention
that formed the Federal constitution, he could not obtain sufficient
co-operation to introduce the invention, and finally left his boat to
rot on the shores of the Hudson and returned to his home at Bardstown,
Ky., where he died in 1798. The unsuccessful struggles of Fitch make a
melancholy history. In his last appeal he used this language: "But why
those earnest solicitations to disturb my nightly repose, and fill me
with the most excruciating anxieties; and why not act the part for
myself, and retire under the shady elms on the fair banks of the Ohio,
and eat my coarse but sweet bread of industry and content, and when I
have done, to have my body laid in the soft, warm, and loamy soil of
the banks, with my name inscribed on a neighboring poplar, that future
generations when traversing the mighty waters of the West, _in the
manner that I have pointed out_, may find my grassy turf."

IN the lives of Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, Ericson, Bruno,
Harvey, Kepler, Newton, Hunter, Gall, Young, Froebel, Gray, Fitch,
Stephenson, and _many_ others, we learn that he who assails the
Gibraltar of conservative and authoritative ignorance must expect to
conduct a very long siege, to maintain a resolute battle, and perhaps
to die in his camp, leaving to his posterity to receive the
predestined surrender of the citadels of Falsehood and Darkness, for
the eternal law of the universe declares that all darkness shall
disappear, and Light and Peace shall cover the earth, as they already
fill the souls of the lovers of wisdom.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS.

UNDERGRADUATE EXPENSES AT HARVARD.--A physician has written me to know
what the annual expense is for an undergraduate at Harvar