For permission to use duplicates of its annotated electroprint copy of Peirce’s manuscripts—the next best thing to the originals—we are indebted to the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University.
Introduction
I
The Decisive Year and Its Early Consequences
MAX H. FISCH
The most decisive year of Peirce’s professional life, and one of the most eventful, was 1867.
Superintendent Bache of the Coast Survey had been incapacitated by a stroke in the summer of 1864. He died on 17 February 1867. Benjamin Peirce became the third Superintendent on 26 February and continued in that position into 1874. He retained his professorship at Harvard and, except for short stays in Washington, he conducted the business of Superintendent from Cambridge. Julius E. Hilgard served as Assistant in Charge of the Survey’s Washington office. On 1 July 1867 Charles was promoted from Aide to Assistant, the rank next under that of Superintendent. He continued in that rank for twenty-four and a half years, through 31 December 1891.
National and international awareness of the Survey was extended by two related episodes beginning in 1867. A treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska, negotiated by Secretary of State William Henry Seward, was approved by the Senate on 9 April, but the House delayed action on the appropriation necessary to complete the transaction. Superintendent Peirce was asked to have a reconnaissance made of the coast of Alaska, and a compilation of the most reliable information obtainable concerning its natural resources. A party led by Assistant George Davidson sailed from San Francisco on 21 July 1867 and returned 18 November 1867. Davidson’s report of 30 November was received by Superintendent Peirce in January, reached President Johnson early in February, and was a principal document in his message of 17 February to the House of Representatives, recommending the appropriation. The bill was finally enacted and signed by the President in July.
Charles’s younger brother, Benjamin Mills Peirce, returned in the summer of 1867 from two years at the School of Mines in Paris. Seward wished to explore the possibility of purchasing Iceland and Greenland from Denmark. His expansionist supporter Robert J. Walker consulted Superintendent Peirce, who had his son Ben compile A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland which he submitted on 14 December 1867, and which his father submitted to Seward on the 16th. With a foreword by Walker, it was published in book form next year by the Department of State. But congressional interest in acquiring the islands was insufficient and no action was taken.1
Joseph Winlock had become the third Director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1866, and working relations between the Survey and the Observatory became closer than they had previously been. (Winlock had been associated with the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac from its beginning in 1852, and for the last several years had been its Superintendent, residing in Cambridge. Benjamin Peirce had been its Consulting Astronomer from the beginning. Charles had done some work for it in recent years. Assistant William Ferrel and he had observed the annular eclipse of the sun at St. Joseph, Missouri, 19 October 1865, and both had submitted written reports to Winlock which are still preserved.) By arrangement with Winlock, Charles began in 1867 to make observations at the Observatory that were reported in subsequent volumes of its Annals. In 1869 he was appointed an Assistant in the Observatory, where, as in the Survey, the rank of Assistant was next to that of Director.
In 1867 the Observatory received its first spectroscope. Among the most immediately interesting of the observations it made possible were those of the auroral light. In volume 8 of the Annals it was reported that “On April 15, 1869, the positions of seven bright lines were measured in the spectrum of the remarkable aurora seen that evening; the observer being Mr. C. S. Peirce.”
By that time, Peirce had begun reviewing scientific, mathematical and philosophical books for the Nation. His second review was of Roscoe’s Spectrum Analysis, on 22 July 1869, and it was both as chemist and as astronomer that he reviewed it. With Winlock’s permission, he reported that
In addition to the green line usually seen in the aurora, six others were discovered and measured at the Harvard College Observatory during the brilliant display of last spring, and four of these lines were seen again on another occasion. On the 29th of June last, a single narrow band of auroral light extended from east to west, clear over the heavens, at Cambridge, moving from north to south. This was found to have a continuous spectrum; while the fainter auroral light in the north showed the usual green line.2
Peirce was a contributor to the Atlantic Almanac for several years, beginning with the volume for 1868. In that for 1870 he had, among other things, an article on “The Spectroscope,” the last paragraph of which was devoted to the spectrum of the aurora borealis and the newly discovered lines.
As an Assistant both in the Survey and in the Observatory, Peirce was an observer of two total eclipses of the sun, at Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 August 1869, and near Catania, Sicily, 22 December 1870. And as late as 1894 he would write: “Of all the phenomena of nature, a total solar eclipse is incomparably the most sublime. The greatest ocean storm is as nothing to it; and as for an annular eclipse, however close it may come to totality, it approaches a complete eclipse not half so near as a hurdy-gurdy a cathedral organ.”
In 1871 the Observatory acquired a Zöllner astrophotometer and Winlock made Peirce responsible for planning its use. More of that in our next volume. And in 1871 Peirce’s father obtained authorization from Congress for a transcontinental geodetic survey along the 39th parallel, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coastal surveys. This led to Charles’s becoming a professional geodesist and metrologist; but that too is matter for the third and later volumes. Back now to 1867.
One of the most famous cases that ever came to trial was the Sylvia Ann Howland will case, and the most famous of the many famous things about it was the testimony of the Peirces, 5 and 6 June 1867. The questions at issue were (1) whether Miss Howland’s signatures to the two copies of the “second page” codicil of an earlier will were genuine, or were forged by tracing her signature to the will itself, and (2) whether, supposing them genuine, the codicil invalidated a later will much less favorable to her niece, Hetty H. Robinson. The Peirces addressed themselves to the first of these questions. Under his father’s direction, Charles examined photographic enlargements of forty-two genuine signatures for coincidences of position in their thirty downstrokes. In 25,830 different comparisons of downstrokes, he found 5,325 coincidences, so that the relative frequency of coincidence was about a fifth. Applying the theory of probabilities, his father calculated that a coincidence of genuine signatures as complete as that between the signatures to the codicil, or between either of them and that to the will in question, would occur only once in five-to-the-thirtieth-power times. The judge was not prepared to base his decision on the theory of probabilities, but he decided against Miss Robinson on the second issue.3 In the Nation for 19 September 1867, under the title “Mathematics in Court,” there appeared a letter to the editor criticizing Benjamin Peirce’s testimony, and a long reply signed “Ed. Nation” but written by Chauncey Wright, concluding that “The value of the present testimony depends wholly on the judgment of his son in estimating coincidences, and does not depend on the judgment of either father or son as mathematical experts.” In a long article on “The Howland Will Case” in the American Law Review for July 1870 it was said that: “Hereafter, the curious stories of Poe will be thought the paltriest imitations.”