THE MODERN SCHOOLS OF ATHENS.—­I visited, with equal surprise and satisfaction, an Athenian school, which contained seven hundred pupils, taken from every class of society.  The poorer classes were gratuitously instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the girls in needlework likewise.  The progress which the children had made was very remarkable; but what particularly pleased me was that air of bright alertness and good-humored energy which belonged to them, and which made every task appear a pleasure, not a toil.  The greatest punishment which can be inflicted on an Athenian child is exclusion from school, though but for a day.  About seventy of the children belonged to the higher classes, and were instructed in music, drawing, the modern languages, the ancient Greek, and geography.  Most of them were at the moment reading Herodotus and Homer.  I have never seen children approaching them in beauty; and was much struck by their Oriental cast of countenance, their dark complexions, their flashing eyes, and that expression, at once apprehensive and meditative, which is so much more remarkable in children than in those of a more mature age.—­De Vere.

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At Berlin, the Academy of Sciences has been holding a sitting, according to its statutes, in honor of the memory of Leibnitz.  In the course of the oration delivered on the occasion, it was stated that the 4th of August being the fiftieth anniversary of the admission of Alexander Von Humboldt as a member of the Academy, it had been resolved, in celebration of the event, to place a marble bust of the “Nestor of Science” in the lecture room of the society.