THE EARL OF DONOUGHMORE died on the 12th of September, at Palmerstown House, county of Dublin, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. He was lord-lieutenant of the county of Tipperary, and had a seat in the House of Lords as a British peer with the title of Viscount Hutchinson, of Knocklofty, but will be better remembered in history as the gallant Colonel Hutchinson, who was one of the parties implicated in the celebrated escape of Lavalette, in the year 1815, shortly after the restoration of the Bourbons. He is succeeded in his extensive estates in the south of Ireland by Viscount Suirdale, his lordship's son by his first wife, the daughter of the Lord Mountjoy, who lost his life in the royal service during the Irish rebellion of 1798. WILLIAM NICOL, F.R.S.E., died in Edinburgh on the 2nd of September, in his eighty-third year. Mr. Nicol commenced his career as assistant to the late Dr. Moyes, the eminent blind lecturer on natural philosophy. Dr. Moyes, at his death, bequeathed his apparatus to Mr. Nicol, who then lectured on the same subject. His contributions to the _Edinburgh Philosophical Journal_ were various and valuable; the more important being his description of his successful repetition of Döbereiner's celebrated experiment of igniting spongy platina by a stream of cold hydrogen gas; and his method of preparing fossil woods for microscopic investigation, which led to his discovery of the structural difference between the arucarian and coniferous woods, by far the most important in fossil botany. But the most valuable contribution to physical science, with which his name will ever be associated, was his invention of the single image prism of calcareous spar, known to the scientific world as Nicol's prism. * * * * *