Solitude, however, which appeared so desirable at a distance, Pallas soon found to be an intolerable curse; the climate, also, fell infinitely short of his expectations, was inconstant and humid, and liable to be altered by every passing wind. It united, in fact, the inconveniences of the north and of the south; yet our traveller endured these evils for fifteen years; but at length, feeling the approaches of old age, he determined at once to escape from the climate of the Crimea and from Russian despotism, and selling his estates at an exceedingly low rate, returned to his native city, after an absence of forty-two years. His health, however, had been so completely undermined by the diseases he had contracted during his travels, and, more than all, by his long residence in the Crimea, that he might be said merely to have looked upon his native place, and on the face of those friends or admirers which his knowledge and fame had gathered around him, before death removed him from the enjoyment of all these things. This event took place on the 8th of September, 1811. Pallas appears to have been an able, learned, and upright man, deeply intent on promoting the interests of science, but indifferent about those great political rights without the enjoyment of which even the sciences themselves are of no more dignity or value than the tricks of a juggler. CARSTEN NIEBUHR. Born 1733.--Died 1815. This traveller was born on the 17th of March, 1733, in the province of Friesland, in the kingdom of Hanover. It would be to mislead the reader to represent him, as some of his biographers have done, as the son of a peasant, in the sense in which that term is applied in England. His father and his ancestors, for several generations, had been small landed proprietors; he himself received an education, and inherited a property, which, however small, served as an incentive to ambition; and though, like many others, he found the entrance of the road to fame rugged and hard to tread, it must not be dissembled that his prudence and perseverance were singularly aided by good fortune.