Jordan, David Starr, 1851–1931, American scientist and educator, b. Gainesville, N.Y., M.S. Cornell, 1872, M.D. Indiana Medical College, 1875, and studied under Louis Agassiz at Penikese Island. He taught (1875–79) at Butler Univ. and in 1879 became professor of zoology and head of the department of natural science at Indiana Univ.; there he was president from 1885 to 1891. He served as the first president (1891–1913) of Stanford Univ. and as chancellor (1913–16). A prolific writer and a popular speaker, he was active as director (1910–14) of the World Peace Foundation and president (1915) of the World Peace Congress. Peace and international arbitration were the subjects of his books The Human Harvest (1907) and War and Waste (1913). As a leading ichthyologist, Jordan served on international commissions for fisheries and as assistant (1877–91, 1894–1909) to the U.S. Fish Commission. His earliest important work, A Manual of the Vertebrate Animals of Northern United States (1876), went through many editions. He also wrote The Fishes of North and Middle America (4 vol., 1896–1900), A Guide to the Study of Fishes (2 vol., 1905), Your Family Tree (with S. L. Kimball, 1929), and Trend of the American University (1929).
See his autobiographical Days of a Man (2 vol., 1922); biography by H. A. Moran (1969).
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