There is no royal death within memory of the present generation which has caused such grave and regretful reflection as the sudden manner in which the Prince Consort was taken from our beloved Sovereign and her family, at the close of the year 1861. The nearest approach to the public sorrow upon this melancholy occasion was the universal sympathy expressed on the loss of the Princess Charlotte, in 1817, when the mother and offspring were at once swept by the hand of death into the same grave! Put widespread as was the lamentation of the people for their hopes being thus crushed, it differed in this respect from the sorrow for the Prince Consort,—that in the one case expectation was blighted, but in the other realisation was extinguished when the fruits of superior intelligence were fast ripening into the maturity of true greatness. Since the death of the Prince the country has learned the full extent of its loss by this sad event. Yet it was plainly asserted in the _Leader_ newspaper, ten years ago, that the Prince was “becoming the most popular man in England;” and the reader was assured that the above paper was written to put the Prince’s “position and his services in the point of view in which we may comprehend him, and be grateful to him.” This statement was unheeded at the time it was made; but, in the year following, other journalists had discovered that the Prince had some voice in English foreign policy,—a charge which was admitted to be true by Ministers in Parliament. Public attention was then turned in an entirely different direction, and the Prince resumed his powerful popular position. Yet his weighty influence, as we have said, was not fully made known until recently. We have seen but one acknowledgment of the service of the well-informed and far-seeing writer in the _Leader_, and to this was not attached his name. We therefore add, in justice to the memory of a man of rare talent, and the right spirit of independence, which is the best characteristic of a public journalist, that the writer in question was the late Mr. E. M. Whitty, who reprinted the above in _The Governing Classes of Great Britain_. ---------------------------- SPECIAL PROVIDENCE IN SCIENCE.