LARDNER VANUXEM. 



1792-1848. 



LARDNER VANUXEM was born in Philadelphia, July 23, 

 1792, and died at his home near Bristol, Pa., January 25, 1848. 

 His father, James Vanuxem, was a shipping merchant of Phila- 

 delphia, formerly of Dunkirk, France a man eminent in busi- 

 ness and highly esteemed as a citizen and in social and domes- 

 tic life. His name was originally written Van Uxem; the 

 form was changed by him partly for convenience in writing, 

 but largely because he had become a great admirer of his 

 adopted country and wished to remove the foreign stamp from 

 his cognomen. James Vanuxem's wife, Rebecca, was a daugh- 

 ter of Colonel Elijah Clarke, of New Jersey. Of their fifteen 

 children Lardner was the eighth. Seven of these lived to long 

 past middle life, and two of them to ninety and over. His 

 maternal grandmother's name was Lardner. 



Of the early educational course of the subject of this 

 sketch there is no record, and no one living has any knowl- 

 edge. It is thought that he was for a time a student in the 

 Pennsylvania University, but this can not be verified. He en- 

 tered his father's counting-house as a young man, but business 

 proved very distasteful to him, his mind having been drawn 

 previously to the cultivation of chemistry and mineralogy. 

 He soon determined to give up all connection with business 

 and devote himself to science. Accordingly, his father gave 

 him the advantage of a three years' residence in Paris, at the 

 School of Mines, where he became the associate of Prof. Alex- 

 andre Brongniart, the Abb Haiiy, and other distinguished 

 men then prominent as professors in the schools of that great 

 scientific metropolis. There he formed an intimate acquaint- 

 ance with the late Prof. Keating, of Philadelphia, who in the 

 same walks was drinking from the same fountain of knowledge. 

 Being graduated in 1819, after a short tour through some dis- 



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