Mr. Ancillon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, was the descendant of a Huguenot family, who, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, sought an asylum in Germany, and is even better known as a philosophical writer and historian, than as a statesman. To him Mr. Wheaton presented his credentials, and as the King, Frederick William III., and his ministers, soon after left Berlin, according to custom, for the summer months, he devoted the interval to visiting the Rhenish provinces, in order to examine their resources and report to Government concerning them. During the ensuing summers he made excursions into different parts of Germany with the same object. In his private letters, he speaks with delight of the beauty and fertility of the country, to which historical associations gave additional charm in his eyes. In a dispatch, he says: "Having diligently explored every state and every province, comprehended in the Customs-Association, with the view of studying their economical resources, I have been forcibly struck with the vast variety and rich productions with which Heaven has endowed this beautiful and highly favored land. Its fields teem with luxuriant harvests of grain and fruit, the hillsides are clad with vineyards yielding the most exquisite wines, the mountains contain inexhaustible treasures of useful minerals, whilst the valleys are filled with health-giving fountains of salubrious waters. When we add to these productions of nature and of agricultural labor, the vast variety of useful and ornamental fabrics, furnished by the persevering and patient industry of the German people, and their extensive consumption of the peculiar staple productions of the New World, we must be convinced of the great and increasing importance of the constituent elements of German commerce, of the valuable exchange it offers to the trade of other countries, and of the benefits which may be derived to our own country, from cultivating and extending the commercial relations between the United States and Germany." In 1837, Mr. Wheaton was raised by President Van Buren to the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary; and we cannot forbear remarking, that after the opposition which--although never a violent party man--he had in previous years shown Mr. Van Buren, it is most honorable to the latter, that no feeling of rancor or pique, withheld him from making a nomination which he felt the public services of his former opponent to deserve.