Schemes that are free of the disadvantages of both the finite-difference and finite-element methods and retain the advantages of the saturation-free grid methods are proposed and investigated. The asymptotic behavior of their maximal N th eigenvalue is the same as the behavior of the N th eigenvalue of a differential operator, and it is not di~cult to apply these discretizations to nonstationary problems. In contrast to polynomial pseudospectral approximations, the schemes of this paper, as well as of E. B. Karpilovskaya, "