THE HERMITAGE AT ST. PETERSBURG WE have given above a very spirited engraving of the Hermitage, or winter palace of the Emperor of Russia. It is situated at the west end of the Admiralty, and near the centre of the town. This huge edifice of stuccoed brick work, forms a squ e, each side representing a front, and lost in a confusion of pillars and st.tues of almost every description. The royal gallery of paintings is in this building; a part is also devoted to mineralogy. JOHNSTONE, in his description of St. Pe tersburg, says, that within the palace or hermitage are artificial gardens, denominated the winter and summer gardens. The first is roofed with glass, laid out in gravel walks, planted with orange trees, and several parterres of flowers, and filled with birds of various countries. The summer garden is exposed to the air, and placed on the top of the palace. In front of the palace is the largest square in the city. One of its sides is formed by a magnificent building, erected by the late empress Catharine for her favorites, but which is now changed to a private clu Via I 27 house by the English and German merchants, and of each side terminated by the public hotels. To the west of the Hermitage, and fronting the river is the palace of the grand duke, partly built of hewn granite, and partly of red Siberian marble: it is probably one of the chastest buildings in St. Petersburg. In the vicinity of this palace are laid out extensive gardens. in every corner of which are exhibited statues, which are condemned to be buried six months in the year under snow. Between the garden and the river is one of the finest and most superb iron railings perhaps to be found in any part of Europe. It is supported by between thirty and forty massive columns of granite, upwards of twenty feet in height, surmounted by large urns. Between the granite columns the iron spears are placed, of the same height, and gilded at the top. At the south end of these gardens is the palace of the late emperor Paul, wherein he was strangled. This colossal and clumsy edifice was one of the many eccentric labors of that unfortunate monarch. Το avoid inhabiting the same palace which his royal mother had occupied, and as a secure asylum against the too just suspicions which he entertained against his nobles, he raised this building in the short space of three years. From this palace he hurled out mandates which menaced the very existence of his empire. Here his eccentricities rose to the highest pitch, and here he met with that fate which must always endanger the madness of despotism. It is said that his death might have been prevented, had he not forgotten to pull a bell wire which communicated under ground with the room where his body guards were assembled. When the artist, Falconet, had finished his statue of Peter the Great, though as admirable a specimen of the art as ever graced the followers of a Phidias or Praxiteles, yet from the rudeness of its pedestal it could not but be rendered too minute in its general outline, he, therefore, in order to assimilate their dimensions, mutilated the rock, and thus gave an imaginary mea sure of bulk to the figure. The attitude of the statue represents the monarch as having gained the summit of the precipice, and restraining the violence of his horse, which is seen rearing on its hind legs, with a full and flowing tail, touching the writhing body of a serpent, on which the horse tramples. The head of the figure is crowned with laurel, and a loose flowing robe is thrown over its body. The left hand holds the reins, while the other, is stretched out in the act of giving benediction to his subjects. On the rock, the following short but expressive inscription is fixed in golden letters, both in the Latin and Russian language: CATHARINE II. TO PETER I. THE EXILE'S DIRGE. (By Mrs. Hemans.) "I attended a funeral where there were a number of the German settlers present. After I had performed such service as is usual on similar occasions, a most venerable looking old man came forward and asked me if I were willing that he should perform some of their peculiar rites. He opened a very ancient version of Luther's hymns, and they all began to sing in German so loud that the woods echoed the strain. There was something affecting in the singing of these ancient people, carrying one of their brethern to his last home, and using the language and rites which they had brought with them over the sea from the Vaterlanda word which often occurred in his hymn. It was a long, slow, and mournful air, which they sang as they bore the body along. The words mein Gott!'—' mein Bruder, and Vaterland' died away in distant echoes amongst the woods. I shall long remember that funeral hymn.'-Flint's Recollections of the Valley of the Mississippi. There went a dirge through the forest's gloom: "Brother!" (so the chant was sung Voices from thy country's vines So swell'd the chant; and the deep wind's moan "Brother! by the rolling Rhine 'gone!" Stands the home that once was thine; "The father-land!"--with that sweet word "Brother! were we there with thee, As ev'n now this dust of thine; And the requiem died in the forest's gloom- CABINET OF NATURE. VARIETY OF NATURE. (Continued.) WHEN we direct our attention to the tribes of ani mated nature, we behold a scene no less variegated and astonishing. Above fifty thousand species of animals have been detected and described by naturalists, besides several thousands of species which the naked eye cannot discern, and which people the in visible regions of the waters and the air. And, as the greater part of the globe has never yet been tho roughly explored, several hundreds, if not thousands, of species unknown to the scientific world, may exist in the depths of the ocean, and in the unexplored regions of the land. All these species differ from one another in color, size, and shape; in the internal structure of their bodies, in the number of their sensitive organs, limbs, feet, joints, claws, wings, and fins; in their dispositions, faculties, movements, and modes of subsistence. They are of all sizes, from the mite and the gnat, up to the elephant and the whale, and from the mite downwards to those invisible animalculæ, a hundred thousand of which would not equal a grain of sand. Some fly through the atmosphere, some glide through the waters, others traverse the solid land. Some walk on two, some on four, some on twenty, and some on a hundred feet. Some have eyes furnished with two, some with eight, some with a hundred, and some with eight thousand distinct transparent globes, for the purposes of vision.* *The eyes of beetles, silkworms, flies and several other kinds of insects are among the most curious and wonderful productions of the God of nature. On the head of a fly are two large protuberances, one on each side; these constitute its organs of vision. The whole surface of these protuberances is covered with a multitude of small hemispheres, placed with the utmost regularity in Tows, crossing each other in a kind of lattice work. These little hemispheres have each of them a minute transparent convex lens in the middle, each of which has a distinct branch of the optic nerve ministering to it; so that the different lenses may be considered as so many distinct eyes. Mr. Leeuwenbock counted 6,236 in the two eyes of a silk-worm, when in its fly state; 3,180 in each eye of a beetle; and 8,000 in the two eyes of a common Ay. Mr. Hook reckoned 14,000 in the eyes of a drone fly; and in one of the eyes of a dragon fly, there have been reckoned 13,500 of these lenses, and, consequently, in both eyes, 27,000, every one of which is capable of forming a distinct image of any object, in the same minner as a common convex glass: so that there are twentyseven thousand im ges formed on the retina of this little animal Mr. Leeuwenhoek having prepared the eye of a fly for the purpose, plared it a little farther from his microscope than when ho would ex mine an object, so as to leave a proper focal distance between it and the lens of his microscope; and then looked through both in the manner of a telescope, at the steeple of a church, |