Proceedings, in amount keeping pace with the increase in the Library and Treasury, and in value not falling below our own high standard.

In 1862, the Society already owned and occupied this building, in smaller dimensions, but was cramped in the provision for its growing collections. Five years later, our munificent benefactor, President Salisbury, presented an adjoining tract of land, with the nucleus of a buildingfund, thus making possible the erection of the western half of this hall in 1877, by which means our shelf accommodations were nearly doubled, while the connected improvements have increased beyond measure the convenience and the safety of administration.

The changes thus recalled awaken at this turning-point of history our lively congratulations and hopes; but the personal changes which accompany, inevitably, every such passage of years supply the strain of melancholy from which few human joys are free. "Other men labored, and we are entered into their labors." Our very progress is the strongest reminder of the devotion and zeal of such friends as our late President and our late Librarian, in preeminent measure, and of others who were associated with them.

At the date of the meeting in October, 1862, three of the Society's charter members were still living,-of whom the last, the Hon. Levi Lincoln, died in 1868. The senior members at the present date, Mr. Bancroft and Mr. Winthrop, were elected forty-nine years ago; and besides these two twenty others remain with us who were active members prior to the semi-centennial meeting.

Of the officers in 1862, no survivors remain except Dr. Hale and Dr. Deane, of the Council and the Publication Committee.

Turning to the record of the six months just elapsed, the Reports of the Treasurer and the Librarian, which are submitted separately, give in detail the current history of the Society in these departments.

We add the customary minute of losses by death. Four members of the Society have died since April :—Ben : Perley Poore, Elias Nason, Charles Rau and Spencer Fullerton Baird.

Major Ben Perley Poore, of the seventh generation from Samuel Poore, who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1638, and settled, in 1650, on Indian Hill in the present township of West Newbury, was born, November 2, 1820, on this farm (which has never been alienated from the family), and in the house built by the first settler.

His grandfather, Daniel Noyes Poore, was a graduate of Harvard in 1777, and a physician of Newbury, and his father was engaged in mercantile business in New York City. His mother, Mary Perley Dodge, was a native of Georgetown, D. C., and so it happened that in his sixth year he was taken to Washington on a visit, and thus his personal recollections of the Capital began at almost the earliest possible moment. Five years later, he accompanied his parents on a trip to Europe. He was then for a short time a pupil in Dummer Academy, near his own door, and later in a New York school, while his father was expecting for him an appointment to the United States Military Academy; but the preparation for West Point proved so distasteful to the youth that he ran away from school, and for nearly two years was not traced by his friends. Meantime he came to Worcester (about 1837), and apprenticed himself as a printer with Jubal Harrington, the publisher of the Republican newspaper. When discovered he was persuaded to return home and begin the study of law; but the taste for journalistic enterprise and for independence had seized him, and his father soon bought for him the Southern Whig, a newspaper published in Athens, Georgia, which he edited for about two years, or until 1842, when the Hon. Henry W. Hilliard, of Alabama, was appointed Minister to Belgium, and Mr. Poore was invited to act as Secretary of Legation.

Mr. Hilliard returned to America in 1844, but Mr. Poore remained abroad until 1847, travelling extensively, and spending some time in Paris in the study of law, with a purpose of practising in New Orleans. In November, 1844, he was authorized by the Massachusetts Historical Society to procure copies of manuscripts in the French archives illustrating the history of New England; subsequently the State assumed the expense of this agency, and a voluminous collection of transcripts now in the State House attests the agent's activity.

During these years he began his career as a newspaper correspondent, furnishing the Boston Atlas with a series of letters under the signature of "Perley," afterwards so well known. He continued his connection with the Atlas after his return, and in December, 1848, assumed editorial management of the Boston Daily Bee, adding to this labor the next month a new venture in the form of a Sunday newspaper, called Perley's Sunday Picnic. His irregular training had not fitted him for successful business management, and in less than a year he gave up these enterprises. One more attempt followed, in 1850, when he started the Boston Sunday Sentinel, which was soon merged in another paper; and after this he confined himself to a more congenial field. His first letters as a Washington correspondent appeared in the Atlas, but in 1852 he undertook a similar service for the Boston Journal, to which paper, until his retirement in 1883, his dispatches signed "Perley,” as accurate as they were entertaining, added an unfailing attraction.

Shortly before the Rebellion he was appointed, under Mr. Corwin's chairmanship, clerk of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, and in 1861 his friend, Senator Sumner, procured for him the corresponding Senate clerkship. From this position he was transferred a year later to that of clerk of the Senate Committee on Printing, in which he continued (with one brief

interruption) until his death, thus having charge of the publication of several most important compilations: such were, his edition in two large octavos of the Federal and State Constitutions and Colonial Charters, published in 1877, and his useful Descriptive Catalogue of Government Publications from 1774 to 1881, which appeared in one volume quarto in 1885. He also edited from 1867 the Congressional Directory, which under his hands took a much improved form, and he assisted in many historical and literary investigations, the results of which were credited to others. In these relations he enjoyed a familiar acquaintance with national leaders, and amassed the stores of information from which he drew for his latest original work, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, published in two volumes in 1886. He was the author of numerous other volumes, most of them historical in their nature.

His tastes were such as to make his election to membership in this Society, in October, 1874, a source of great pleasure, and so lately as at our last annual meeting he was present and took part in the discussions of the morning. His health had been impaired already by serious illness, from Bright's disease, in the spring of 1884. He recovered from that attack, but his final illness, from the same cause, began on May 17, 1887, and terminated in his death, at Washington, on the 28th of the same month, in the 67th year of his age.

The military title by which he was known was a reminder of his organizing in 1861 a battalion of riflemen in Newbury, which formed the nucleus of a company in the 8th Massachusetts.

His wife, who survives him, was Miss Virginia Dodge, of Georgetown, D. C. Their children were two daughters, now deceased.

The Rev. Elias Nason was elected into this Society in October, 1865, and died in Billerica, Massachusetts, June

17, 1887, in the 77th year of his age.

He was born in

Wrentham, Massachusetts, April 21, 1811, the son of Levi and Sarah (Nelson) Nason, and the great-grandson of Willoughby Nason, who settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1712. In his infancy the family removed to the neighboring town of Hopkinton, where some of his early years were spent on the estate once occupied by Sir Henry Frankland. At the age of fifteen he was set to learn the business of paper-making, at a mill in Framingham, but his desire for education overcame all difficulties, and by teaching he gained the means for preparation for college at a school in Amherst, whence he went to Brown University, where he was graduated in 1835. In February, 1836, he was persuaded by relatives in the south to remove to that section, where he remained until July, 1840. During this time he pursued theological studies, edited (in 1837) the Georgia Courier, in Augusta, taught for three years in Waynesboro', in the adjoining county, and began his career as a public lecturer. After returning to Massachusetts, he was engaged for four years as a teacher in Newburyport. In the summer of 1849 he was licensed to preach by the Essex North Association of Congregational Ministers, and in the ensuing fall was appointed principal of the Milford High School. This post he held until his ordination as pastor of the Congregational Church in Natick, May 5, 1852. He was there brought into intimate relations with his distinguished parishioner, the Hon. Henry Wilson, of whom he afterward helped to write a campaign biography. Mr. Nason left Natick in November, 1858, to accept a call to the Mystic Church in Medford, and two years later he was transferred to the pastorate of the First Church in Exeter, N. H., where he continued until May, 1865. During the war he served on the United States Christian Commission, and wrote and spoke extensively for the Union cause. On leaving Exeter, he settled in (North) Billerica, Massachusetts, where his residence continued until his death, though