Strange incidents befel Professor Forbes, and his companions, in their travels through the Alps of Savoy. On one occasion, they got so near a thundercloud, as to be highly electrified by induction, with all the angular stones round them hissing like points near a powerful electrical machine; on another, whilst crossing one of the loftiest passes, the Col de Collon, they discovered a dark object lying on the snow, which proved to be the body of a man, with the clothes hard-frozen and uninjured. "The effect on us all," says the Professor, "was electric; and had not the sun shone forth in its full glory, and the very wilderness of eternal snow seemed gladdened under the serenity of such a summer's day, as is rare at these heights, we should certainly have felt a deeper thrill, arising from the sense of personal danger. As it was, when we had recovered our first surprise, and interchanged our expression of sympathy for the poor traveller, and gazed with awe on the disfigured relics of one who had so lately been in the same plight with ourselves, we turned and surveyed, with a stronger sense of sublimity than before, the desolation by which we were surrounded; and became still more sensible of our isolation from human dwellings, human help, and human sympathy, our loneliness with nature, and as it were, the more immediate presence of God." ------------------ PHILOSOPHICAL ENTHUSIASM. "Never shall I forget," says Agassiz, "the impression which the sight of the _Pterichthys_, provided with appendages resembling wings, produced upon me, when I assured myself that it belonged to the class of fishes. It was an entirely new type, which was about to figure, for the first time since it had ceased to exist, in the series of beings--again to form a link which nothing of all that had been revealed up to the time with regard to extinct creations, would have led us ever to suspect the existence of--showing forcibly that observation alone can lead us to the recognition of the laws of development of organized beings; and how much we should guard against all those systems of transformation of species, which the imagination invents with as much facility as reason refutes them." ------------------ "SHEPHERD TO THE KING OF ENGLAND FOR SCOTLAND."