Very sad intelligence has reached England of the fate of a party of seven missionaries, who were sent out by the Protestant Missionary Society, in 1850, to Patagonia. Captain Gardiner was at the head of the band. The vessel that took them out landed at Picton Island, off the southern coast of Terra del Fuego, on the 6th of December, 1850, and kept hovering about to see how they were likely to be received. The natives seemed menacing: but on the 18th of December the missionaries left the ship, and with their stores of provisions, Bibles, &c., embarked in two boats, meaning to make for the coast of Terra del Fuego. On the 19th the ship sailed; and no news of them having reached England, the ship _Dido_ was ordered by the Admiralty in October, 1850, to touch there, and ascertain their fate. The _Dido_ reached the coast in January, and after ten or twelve days of search, on a rock near where they first landed on Picton Island, a writing was found directing them to go to Spaniard Harbor, on the opposite Fuegan coast. Here were found, near a large cavern, the unburied bodies of Captain Gardiner and another of the party; and the next day the bodies of three others were found. A manuscript journal, kept by Captain Gardiner, down to the last day when, only two or three days before his death, he became too weak to write, was also found, from which it appeared that the parties were driven off by the natives whenever they attempted to land; that they were thus compelled to go backward and forward in their boats, and at last took refuge in Spaniard harbor, as the only spot where they could be safe; that they lived there eight months, partly in a cavern and partly under shelter of one of the boats, and that three of them died by sickness, and the others by literal and lingering starvation. Four months elapsed between the death of the last of the party and the discovery of their bodies. The publication of the journal of Captain Gardiner, in which profound piety is shown mingled with his agonizing grief, has excited a deep sensation throughout England.----An explosion occurred in a coal pit in the Aberdare valley, South Wales, on the 10th, by which sixty-four lives were lost; another pit near Pembrey filled with water the same night, and twenty-seven men were drowned.----The fate of the Crystal Palace was sealed by a vote in the House of Commons of 103 to 221 on a proposition to provide for its preservation. It has been sold, and is to be forthwith taken down, and re-erected out of town, for a winter garden.----A memorial numerously and most respectably signed, was presented to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, on the 17th of May, praying that the Queen would extend clemency to the Irish State prisoners now in exile at Van Dieman's Land. The Lord Lieutenant, in a brief and direct speech, declined to lay the memorial before her Majesty, on the ground that the exiles in question deserved no further clemency at her hands.