The meeting of the New York Mathematical Society that Peirce had come to New York to attend was held on Saturday, 7 November 1891, at Columbia College and Peirce was elected to its membership, along with Simon Newcomb and others. Peirce had been invited to join the society by Harold Jacoby, Professor of Astronomy at Columbia. Peirce would become an active participant in the meetings of the New York Mathematical Society and his intellectual development from this time on was to some degree influenced by his association with the society’s members and his involvement in debates over the latest developments in mathematics.64
The following Tuesday, 10 November, the National Academy of Sciences began its three days of meetings, also at Columbia College. Peirce was the discussant for a paper by Ogden Rood, “On a Color System,” and also for Seth C. Chandler’s paper, “On the Variation of Latitude.” A presentation that surely attracted Peirce’s attention was Mendenhall’s paper, “On the Use of a Free Pendulum as a Time Standard.” But principally, Peirce presented a paper entitled “Astronomical Methods of Determining the Curvature of Space,” described as presenting “astronomical evidence tending to show that space possesses a negative curvature, and [calling] attention to various methods of conducting an investigation of this property of space.” The paper, no longer extant, must have been based on methods set out in selection 36 and the results of subsequent measurements of curvature following those methods. Edward C. Pickering, Director of Harvard College Observatory, was the discussant. Three months prior to the meeting, on 9 August, Pickering had sent Peirce the following remark: “Your hypothesis regarding the distribution of the stars is very interesting. As I understand it, hyperbolic space is a mental conception and not a physical fact. It is therefore difficult to understand how it can represent a material phenomenon except by an accidental coincidence.” The content of Pickering’s response at the meeting was not reported. Peirce’s paper continued to attract attention after the meeting. On 7 December, George Bruce Halsted wrote to express his great interest in it and asked for a reprint of it if one was available, and on 27 February 1892 E. H. Moore, then of Northwestern University but soon to be Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, asked for the same favor.
After the Academy meetings concluded, Peirce had a brief meeting with Mendenhall on Sunday, 15 November, in Hoboken to talk about his “retirement” from the Survey, but Mendenhall decided that they should continue their discussions in Washington. The next day, he issued “official instructions” for Peirce to “proceed to Washington, D.C., for conference with Superintendent,” and promised to cover travel expenses. On the 18th, Peirce wrote to Mendenhall about their discussion in Hoboken: “I feel impelled to say that one or two things you said to me on Sunday appear to me quite wrong.” Peirce objected to Mendenhall’s dismissal, for mere fiscal reasons, of the aspirations of assistants striving to meet higher standards:
That view seems to me in the first place to overlook the facts of human nature. If you pay a man a very low salary to begin with, and then forbid him to have any warmth or zeal in the conduct of his office, carefully remove all intellectual interest it might have and leave him nothing but the pure money to work for, and finally construct a series of fiscal regulations the main purpose of which seems to be to take up as much time with accounts as possible,—if you do all that you will have the heads of bureaus even worse than they are now. In the second place, it rather shocks me to hear you who know what a slough of materialism this country is sunk in, where nothing is considered as sacred except the holy, holy, holy dollar,—giving in to complaints against heads of bureaus that they are spending a little money in trying to advance science…. Then you say that the prosecution of science should be left to the Universities. Well, I admit the official science here is not very much, but I must say it is better than any our universities can give.
On 19 November, probably before receiving Peirce’s impassioned letter, Mendenhall recorded in his diary: “A.M. office: meet Professor Peirce. He walks with me to E. 18 St. N.E. and we arrange for his withdrawal from the Survey.” He met Peirce again the following evening at his club where, presumably, they discussed arrangements for the conclusion of Peirce’s employment—although Peirce was not yet ready to accept that his career as a professional scientist was so quickly coming to an end.
Probably on the same night, Peirce met with his old friend, George Ferdinand Becker, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, and regaled him with an account of his cosmology; they had a lively conversation, Becker providing objections Peirce found most beneficial. Peirce must have then told Becker about the loss of his Coast Survey position and the financial predicament it put him in, for soon afterwards Becker wrote to Mrs. Louis Agassiz to see if she would approach Augustus Lowell about engaging Peirce for a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute. Mrs. Agassiz had always liked Peirce and was happy to oblige; she forwarded Becker’s letter to Lowell and urged him to engage Peirce. Lowell readily agreed to offer Peirce a course of lectures for the following winter. Peirce was touched when he learned of this outcome and thanked Becker at once: “Now this is a truly charming thing that you have done…. I hope I shall some day be able to reciprocate.”
Peirce wrote to Lowell on 6 December offering to lecture either on the history of science from Copernicus to Newton or on the comparative biography of great men. He sketched what he had in mind for each alternative, outlining the first course as follows:
Two introductory lectures would be required, one to sketch the whole history of science and show that the period in question is the heart of the whole, the other to run over that period and show in a general way what are the works calling for further study. It is to the methods of reasoning that I should draw special attention; and Kepler who on the whole was I think the greatest reasoner who ever lived, would claim three hours. Newton would call for two, Leibniz for one, Galileo for one, Copernicus, Harvey, Gilbert, and Bacon would together want two, Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, would want one. I have counted up to 12, though I have omitted Huygens, Boyle, and other great names, for whom, and for a résumé and concluding sketch of subsequent history, room would have to be made by compression.
Lowell chose the lectures on the history of science, “a subject which your studies have led you to explore so deeply that there is probably no one who could treat it with so much knowledge and acumen as you,” and agreed to twelve lectures (8 Dec. 1891). Peirce knew that Lowell would pay well but it would be several months before he could expect to see a check from him.65
From Washington Peirce returned to New York to make some money, not wanting to go home to Milford empty-handed. Garrison obliged Peirce by giving him an advance, assigning him a piece on Oliver Wolcott Gibbs for the Nation’s graveyard (Gibbs would live until 1908), and asking him to review George F. Chambers’s Pictorial Astronomy for General Readers and Dascom Greene’s Introduction to Spherical and Practical Astronomy. Peirce’s dismissive review of Chambers appeared in the Nation on 26 November (sel. 41), and his review of Greene on 17 December. In the latter, Peirce took the opportunity to express his opinion about textbooks: “A book such as this might easily have been, which should touch upon every necessary matter with logical severity, giving all that is needed and excluding all that is superfluous,