NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Amherst and Williston recently had a billiard contest.

The old plates of Harper's Magazine are soon to be destroyed.

The College Transcript (Ohio) this month devotes over half of its space to a poem. The poem is printed very neatly.

American students now enter college at the average age of seventeen. We have recently seen an old English book with the date of 1785, in which the average age of "ye freshmen at ye College of Harvard" is given as thirteen years and six months.

Herr Earnst Hackel, who for two years past has been engaged in making zoological and botanical researches in the south of Ceylon, has nearly completed his labors of the island and will shortly leave for Egypt. Fifty cases, containing the results of his long efforts, have left Ceylon for Jena.

According to the latest statistics published, there are now 165 gymnasiums in Austria, frequented by 53, 142 pupils. In 95 of these schools the pupils are taught in the German idiom, in 33 in Zchech, and in 21 in Polish. Four of them are Italian, one is Ruthene, seven are Utraquist, and four are Serbo-Croat.

We have come across the following passage of a letter written by Daniel Webster to his son Fletcher, who was about to be graduated at Harvard, in 1833: "I have seldom felt so much concern about anything of the kind as I do upon your success upon that occasion. I pray you spare no pains. Do your best, and you will do well enough. I earnestly remind you of the necessity of acting with great caution in regard to all festivities. You remember what I said to you on that head, and I pray you forget no part of it." - [Scholastic.