les of the Persian frontier. By a rapid flank
movement an army of 10,000 Persians was detached and brought to surrender.
Erivan, the bulwark of Persia, was taken by assault. The triumphant Russian
column entered Pauris, the second city of the kingdom. Thence an advance
was made on Teheran.

[Sidenote: Intervention in Greece favored]

These easy victories in Persia left the Czar free to resume his threatening
attitude toward Turkey. In this he received the hearty support of Canning.
A protocol at St. Petersburg, concluded between the Duke of Wellington and
Nesselrode, formed the basis for Anglo-Russian intervention in the East.
The royalists of France were won over by an offer from the Greek insurgents
to place the Duke of Nimours on the throne of Greece. Without giving actual
support to the proposed intervention the French ambassador in
Constantinople was instructed to act with his English and Russian
colleagues. Under the weight of this combination even Prince Metternich
gave way.

Affairs in Germany were calculated to excite his alarm. At Dresden the
accession of Anthony Clement to the crown of Saxony met with extreme
disfavor on the part of the Saxon people by reason of Anthony's pronounced
Catholicism. Soon his measures provoked a rising of the people. Anthony had
to resign, and Frederick Augustus II. became regent.

[Sidenote: Death of Hauff]

In Wurtemberg, where public affairs had taken a more liberal turn, the
death of Wilhelm Hauff, the young author, was felt as a great loss. Hauff
died in his twenty-fifth year, while still in the first promise of his
literary activity. His stories of the Black Woods and his Oriental Tales,
together with his medieval romance "Lichtenstein," modelled after the best
of Walter Scott's romances, have assured him a prominent place in German
letters.

[Sidenote: Laplace]

[Sidenote: The nebular hypothesis]

On March 15, Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace, one of the greatest
mathematicians and physical astronomers of all time, died at Arcueil.
Laplace was born in 1749, in Normandy. Although a poor farmer's son, he
soon won the position of a teacher at the Beaumont Military School of
Mathematics, and later at the Ecole Militaire of Paris. One of the early
notable labors of Laplace was his investigation of planetary perturbations,
and his demonstration that planetary mean motions are invariable--the first
important step in the establishment of the stability of the solar system
a