At the 616th meeting of the American Academy, on 26 January 1870, as reported by Chauncey Wright, its Recording Secretary, “The President… communicated by title … a paper ‘On the Extension of Boole’s System to the Logic of Relations by C. S. Peirce’.” Late in the spring, Peirce supplied final copy; it was set in type and he was given fifty copies in paperback quarto book form, dated Cambridge 1870, “Extracted from the Memoirs of the American Academy, Vol. IX,” though that volume did not appear until three years later.
Also late in the spring, since the National Academy, only seven years old, had as yet no funds for printing the papers or books its members presented, Julius E. Hilgard, a fellow member of the Academy, took Superintendent Peirce’s manuscript, had it copied in a more ornate and legible hand, and then had fifty copies lithographed from it.
When Charles sailed from New York on 18 June 1870, he took with him copies of the lithographed book and the printed memoir. In London on 11 July he delivered one of each, with a covering letter from his father, to De Morgan’s residence. On a later day he had a visit with De Morgan, who, unfortunately, was already in the final decline that ended in his death in the following March, eleven days after Charles’s return to Cambridge.
Charles presented another copy of the DNLR to W. S. Jevons, from whom he received a letter about it farther along on his eastward journey, to which he replied from Pest on 25 August (pp. 445–47 below).
Directly or indirectly, Robert Harley too received a copy. At the Liverpool meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September, Harley first presented “Observations on Boole’s ‘Laws of Thought’ by the late R. Leslie Ellis,” and then a paper by himself “On Boole’s ‘Laws of Thought’ “ (continuing one he had presented four years earlier), in which, after reviewing recent works by Jevons, Tait, and Brodie, he said: “But the most remarkable amplification of Boole’s conceptions which the author has hitherto met with is contained in a recent paper by Mr. C. S. Peirce, on the ‘Logic of Relatives’.” He proceeds to quote the passage on “the three grand classes” of logical terms that appears on pages 364–65 below, and then the sentence that appears on page 359: “Boole’s logical algebra has such singular beauty, so far as it goes, that it is interesting to inquire whether it cannot be extended over the whole realm of formal logic, instead of being restricted to that simplest and least useful part of the subject, the logic of absolute terms, which, when he wrote, was the only formal logic known.” “The object of Mr. Peirce’s paper,” he went on, “is to show that this extension is possible,” and he gave some account of the notation and processes employed.
So Clifford was not alone in thinking that Peirce was “the second man since Aristotle.” He was present at the meeting and spoke “On an Unexplained Contradiction in Geometry.” He and Peirce may have met in London in July, and he too may then have received a copy of DNLR. If not, they almost certainly met as eclipse observers near Catania in December. In any case, they became well acquainted not later than 1875.
Two brief examples now of Benjamin Peirce’s distribution of copies of LAA. In Berlin, on his way to Sicily in November, he gave two copies to our ambassador, his old friend and former colleague, the historian George Bancroft; one for himself and one to present to the Berlin Academy, of which he was a member. And in January, after the eclipse, he addressed the London Mathematical Society on the methods he had used in his LAA, and presented a copy to the Society. Clifford was present and proposed the name “quadrates” for the class of the algebras that includes quaternions, and the Peirces adopted the proposal.
From London in the last week of July 1870, shortly after the Vatican Council had declared the conditions of papal infallibility, and just as the Franco-Prussian War began, Charles journeyed eastward by way of Rotterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Pest, the Danube, and the Black Sea, to Constantinople. Then he began moving westward along the path of totality in search of eligible sites. (He recommended sites in Sicily and southern Spain, and became himself a member of one of the Sicilian teams.) In Berlin he visited Amy Fay, and she accompanied him to Dresden, chiefly for visits to the great art museum there. In Vienna, the director of the Observatory was hospitable and helpful. From Pest, he wrote the letter to Jevons. In Constantinople he enjoyed the guidance of Edward H. Palmer, “the most charming man” he had so far known, and of Palmer’s friend Charles Drake; and he began the study of Arabic. In Thessaly he found the English consul most helpful, and the impressions he formed there he later worked up into “A Tale of Thessaly” of which he gave several readings. From Chambéry in Savoy, after his visit to Spain, he wrote to his mother on 16 November 1870, five weeks before the eclipse, that he had heard eighteen distinct languages spoken, seventeen of them (including Basque) in places where they were the languages of everyday speech.
On the whole, the American observations and inferences of the preceding year were vindicated. This was Peirce’s first experience of large-scale international scientific cooperation. He had already committed himself to the social theory of logic, but this experience and those of his four later European sojourns confirmed him in that commitment.
Julius E. Hilgard, the Assistant in Charge of the Survey’s Washington Office, which included the Office of Weights and Measures until the creation of the National Bureau of Standards in 1901, was to spend several months in Europe in mid-1872. Among other duties, he was to represent the United States at a Paris conference looking toward the international bureau of weights and measures which was finally established there in 1875. Peirce was to substitute for Hilgard in his absence, and that called for several weeks of previous training under Hilgard’s supervision. He spent most of December 1871 and part of January 1872 at the new quarters of the Survey in the elegant Richards Building on Capitol Hill, where the Longworth House Office Building now stands. Hilgard gave good reports of his progress.
Hilgard’s European sojourn would of course enhance his qualifications for succeeding Peirce’s father as Superintendent of the Survey. Peirce’s training and experience would qualify him to succeed Hilgard in case of Hilgard’s death or resignation or promotion to Superintendent. It would even qualify him, under conceivable future circumstances, to be considered for the superintendency.
The Philosophical Society of Washington (in whose name, as in that of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, “philosophical” meant scientific) had held its first meeting on 13 March 1871. At its 17th meeting, on 16 December 1871, Charles presented the first of the six wide-ranging papers he presented to that Society. It was “On the Appearance of Encke’s Comet as Seen at Harvard College Observatory.”
Charles’s father was to address the Cambridge Scientific Club on 28 December 1871 on the application of mathematics to certain questions in political economy, such as price and amount of sale, and the conditions of a maximum. Charles undertook to prepare diagrams for his father to exhibit at that meeting, and these were mailed to Cambridge on or about the 19th.
Simon Newcomb, then at the Naval Observatory, called on Charles on the 17th and they conversed about these matters. (Fifteen years later Newcomb published a book entitled Principles of Political Economy on which Charles commented adversely.) In the evening after the visit Charles wrote Newcomb a letter explaining what he had meant by saying that the law of supply and demand holds only for unlimited competition, and concluded: “P.S. This is all in Cournot.” (On the strength of this letter, Baumol and Goldfeld recently included Peirce among their Precursors in Mathematical Economics.) In the same evening, Charles wrote to his wife Zina, who had remained in Cambridge, that he had been spending his evenings on political economy, and gave her some account of the questions he had been pursuing. On the 19th, he wrote a letter to his father, beginning: “There is one point on which I get a different result from Cournot, and it makes me suspect the truth of the proposition that the seller puts his price so as to make his profits a maximum.”13
Charles’s own principal