it so necessary for an historical society to be well organized on solid and broad foundations and to have a strong membership for investigations of every sort. A variety of investigators with independent points of view is peculiarly needed by our difficult history. We need members of all ages, old and young. The necessity of the Historical Society being what the history of Pennsylvania demanded that it should be, was the key of Mr. Jordan's devotion to it. This Society was especially the place where the civil side of his devotion to public duty was manifested. Bethlehem and Nazareth were especially the places where another side of that devotion was manifested. And now the end has come. He has passed away in perfect peace. His works live after him. The noblest of them is the one which our present members will ever recall, when young members shall ask them in time to come what his portrait means it is the noble and modest example which his life has given us in private and public duty.

The President then introduced Dr. James J. Levick, who read the following Memorial Address:

In every household there is one of the family who holds pre-eminence of position there. Men call the house by his name; its very existence seems bound up in his existence; while, to the family itself, he is their comforter in sorrow, their counsellor in doubt, their protector from danger, their helper whenever help is needed. Death comes, and the place which has known him knows him no more. For a time it seems as if the very life of the family had gone out with the life of him who has left it, and when, at last, its daily duties are again taken up by survivors, it is with a painful, ever-recurring sense of a vacant place at the hearth

and a vacant place in the heart which can never again be filled as they have been.

It is in the full sense of just such a loss, fellow-members of the Historical Society, that we meet to-night in tender, loving, filial remembrance of one who, for fifty years a member of this household, for more than thirty years has been so closely identified with its daily life, that, even now, we cannot think of these rooms without seeming to see, quietly moving about in them, the venerable form of him who was indeed pre-eminent in our household, our counsellor in doubt, our helper whenever help was needed.

John Jordan, Jr., the son of John and Elizabeth (Henry) Jordan, was born in Philadelphia, May 18, 1808. His paternal ancestors were Germans, but the name is traced by the family to an earlier ancestor, who, soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, left France for Germany, whither many of his fellow-countrymen had already gone.

Soon after his arrival in Philadelphia, in 1738, the elder Jordan removed to Hunterdon County, N. J., where he resided during the remainder of his life. Frederick Jordan, son of the emigrant, was born at Mt. Pleasant, N. J., A.D. 1744, and married Catharine, daughter of Henry Eckel, a native of Hannau, Germany. Frederick Jordan was a well-to-do farmer, owning several mills, who managed his business with shrewdness and fidelity, securing for himself and family a comfortable independence. His son, John Jordan, Sr., was born at the family seat, Mt. Pleasant, September 1, 1770. From an early age the boy showed great aptitude for business, and, after the death of his father, when but fifteen years of age, was sent to the countinghouse of Godfrey Haga, a relative by marriage, and a well

known merchant of Philadelphia, where, in subsequent years, he succeeded him in business.

John Jordan, Sr., married Elizabeth, the daughter of the Hon. William Henry, Judge of the Northampton and Monroe County districts, and who as a Presidential Elector cast his vote for General Washington at his second nomination for the Presidency.

John Jordan, Jr.'s, career in life was so much influenced by his grandfather Henry's care and interest for him that he deserves at least a brief notice in this sketch of his grandson. Judge Henry was the great-grandson of Robert Henry, a Scotchman, who came to America from Coleraine, Ireland, in the year 1722, and settled in Chester County, Pennsylvania. William Henry, the grandson of Robert, was brought up in Lancaster, apprenticed to Matthew Roeser, a gun-maker there.

Upon the breaking out of the Indian War, in 1754, he was appointed Armorer to the troops collected for Braddock's expedition. He again accompanied the troops on the second outbreak of the Indian War. Returning to Lancaster, he entered into the iron and hardware business. He was a man of much natural ability, was an early friend of the artist Benjamin West, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the inventor of several ingenious pieces of machinery. He signed the non-importation paper of the merchants of Philadelphia, was a member of the Assembly from Lancaster, and of the Continental Congress, and President Judge of the County. He was engaged in the manufacture of rifles for the State of Pennsylvania, and a commissary under Washington.

His son William Henry, grandfather of the subject of this memoir, was also engaged in the manufacture of fire-arms, and in the year 1778 removed to the Moravian settlement,

Christian's Spring, near Nazareth, and later to Nazareth. In 1798 he contracted with the State of Pennsylvania for two thousand, and in 1809 with the United States for ten thousand, muskets. He thereupon erected the Boulton gunworks, near Nazareth, and in 1808 a forge to manufacture refined bar-iron. This settlement of his grandfather at Nazareth with the Moravians, to whose church he belonged, had, as has already been said, much influence on the life of John Jordan, Jr.

It is interesting in this connection to notice the blending of blood which the marriage of John Jordan, Sr., and Elizabeth Henry exhibits,-the French Huguenot, the sturdy German, the firm, decided Scotch-Irish. As a great statesman has said of this blood, "there is none better, none braver, none truer. There is in it an inheritance of courage, of manliness, of imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle."

John Jordan, Jr., received his earliest literary education at a school on Front Street, near Arch Street, taught by a pedagogue well known in that day, one Peter Widders. After this he began the study of the Latin and Greek languages and mathematics, under the care of Dr. James P. Espy, whose famous treatise on the "Philosophy of Storms" gained for him the title of "the Storm-King." Among his fellow-students were the late Dr. Wm. W. Gerhard and John C. Trautwine, Esq. Espy was a man of great enthusiasm and well fitted to interest and instruct a bright scholar such as he himself describes young Jordan to be. In the year 1826, John Jordan, Jr., entered the University of Pennsylvania. He was a favorite with his classmates, and was early elected a member of the Philomathean, the popular college society of that day. But his health, which had never been robust, by application to his studies became still

more affected, and an impairment of his sight compelled him reluctantly to retire from the University at the close of his Junior year. But the friendships formed during his brief college stay continued during life. Among his classmates were the late Dr. Joseph Carson, while of those who survive him are the Hon. Isaac Hazlehurst, John Ashhurst, Sr., Henry Pratt McKean, and Robert B. Davison. When but a boy of ten or twelve years he had been sent to Nazareth, Pa., to spend the summer months. Here his grandfather Henry lived, and here, though never a resident pupil at Nazareth Hall, he was permitted, with his cousin, James Henry, to attend as a day-scholar. "But what we most enjoyed," writes his now venerable relative, "were the long walks with our dear grandpa in the forest or in fishing in the Bushkill creek." Here the young Philadelphian regained much of the health he had lost in the city. Mr. Jordan always retained a warm affection for the companions and scenes of his youth, and was accustomed in later life to pass a part of each year in Nazareth or its vicinity.

So much better suited to his health had his life in the country proved, that in his early manhood Mr. Jordan was induced to accept a proposal made him by his uncle, and join him in the manufacture of bar-iron, a business for a time carried on by them near Stroudsburg, Monroe County, Pa. A little later they removed to the Oxford furnace, near Belvidere, N. J. While operating this latter the experiment was made by them of applying anthracite coal to the production of pig metal, but this, along with similar experiments made elsewhere at this date, proved unsuccessful.

The changes in the tariff, which paralyzed the iron trade, induced Mr. Jordan to retire from this business, and he returned to Philadelphia, where he became a partner in the