The reign of the Emperor Nicholas has been distinguished by the important discovery, that portions of the great _eastern_ regions of Siberia are highly auriferous; viz., the government of Tomsk and Teniseik, where low ridges, similarly constructed to those on the eastern flank of the Ural, and like them, trending from north to south, appear as offsets from the great east and west chain of the Altai, which separates Siberia from China. And here, it is curious to remark, that a very few years ago, this distant region did not afford a third part of the gold which the Ural produced; but by recent researches, an augmentation so rapid and extraordinary has taken place, that in 1843 the eastern Siberian tract yielded considerably upwards of two-and-a-quarter millions sterling, raising the total gold produce of the Russian empire to nearly _three millions sterling_!--_Sir R. I. Murchison_. ------------------ COMBINATIONS OF THE KALEIDOSCOPE. The system of endless changes is one of the most astonishing properties of the Kaleidoscope. With a number of loose objects--pieces of glass, for example,--it is possible to reproduce any figure we have admired, when it is once lost. Centuries may elapse before the same combination returns; if the objects, however, are placed in the cell so as to have very little motion, the same figure may be recalled, and if actually fixed, the same pattern will return in every evolution of the object-plate. A calculation of the number of forms is given upon the ordinary principles of combination; namely, that twenty-four pieces of glass may be combined 13,917,242,888,872,552,999,425,128,493,402,200 times--an operation the performance of which would take hundreds of thousands of millions of years, even upon the supposition that twenty combinations were effected every minute! ------------------ "THE MEANS TO THE END."