themselves, requires that governmental aid shall be given to the common schools of the country. * * * * * BENEFACTIONS Ex-Gov. Colby has made a conditional pledge of $10,000 to the trustees of the Maine Agricultural College. Gen. E. W. Leavenworth, of Syracuse, N.Y., has recently given $10,000 to Hamilton College to found a scholarship. Of the £265,000 endowment secured last year for the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Joseph A. Wharton gave £100,000. Newton Case, of Hartford, Conn., has offered to give $100,000 for the library of Hartford Theo. Sem., provided an equal amount is raised. By the sale of the Williston Mills at Easthampton, Williston Seminary comes into possession of $200,000 and Amherst College of $100,000. Over $100,000 has been raised for land and a new dormitory at Williams College. The fund for the Garfield Professorship amounts to $42,000. The late Joseph E. Sheffield gives $100,000 to the Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown, Conn. His gifts to Yale College will probably aggregate from half a million to a million and a half. University College, Liverpool, England, is to receive £105,000 from different individuals. Lord Derby, the Rathborne family, Mrs. Grant and the trustees of the late R. L. Jones have _subscribed_ £10,000 each of the amount. “_The colored people are too poor to endow their schools. Their very existence is endangered so long as they are made to depend upon the yearly gifts of the churches. To endow is to carry a magnificent beginning to completion._”‒Rev. T. J. Morgan, D.D. * * * * * GENERAL NOTES. AFRICA. ‒It is reported that Piaggia, the Italian explorer, who purposed penetrating the Galla country in Southern Abyssinia, is dead. ‒Col. Mills, who formerly occupied the post of Consul-General and English Political Agent at Mascate, has been appointed to succeed Dr. Kirk at Zanzibar. ‒M. Maspéro, director of the Egyptian museum, has succeeded in discovering the opening of the pyramid of Meydoum which has passed until now as impenetrable. ‒M. Tagliabue, correspondent of the _Exploratore_, has made from Massaoua an excursion among the Bogos, where he has specially studied the tobacco plantations. ‒M. Godfrey Roth, who gave proof of so much zeal at the time of the arrival of the caravans of slaves at Siout, has been attached to Giegler Pasha, at Khartoum, for the suppression of the slave trade. ‒Rohlfs has written the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society that he hoped to return to London in January, and go from thence to Cairo, to negotiate peace with the Khedive on the part of the King of Abyssinia, under the auspices of the English government, from which he beseeches aid in favor of the Emperor of Abyssinia. * * * * * THE INDIANS. ‒The London Missionary Society has furnished their Indian missions on the North Pacific Coast with a small steamer. The Baptists also have one on Puget Sound.