As the days grew warmer Peirce’s own health improved and he became excited at the prospect of farming Quicktown. He purchased two farm horses for harvesting hay, decided to raise a calf that had been born to his Guernsey cow, had five hundred Palmetto asparagus plants set out, and was probably as content as he had been for many years. He missed his young wife and considered renaming Quicktown “Sunbeams” in her honor. When Juliette returned she had not improved and in May Peirce asked for a two-week leave from his Coast Survey duties to take her to New York for medical tests. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, as Peirce had feared. They returned to Milford for the summer and fall knowing that Juliette could not spend the next winter in Milford. That realization was perhaps less worrisome than it would have been had Peirce not recently received fairly substantial payments from the estates of his mother and aunt—$1450 in April alone.
Certainly given the demands of the farm and the renovations to the house, and his preoccupation with Juliette’s health, along with the pressure from his continuing responsibilities to the Century Company and the Coast Survey, Peirce had little time for anything else. But occasionally something would happen to turn his thought from its main course. Perhaps this happened most frequently as a result of the great variety of subjects he had to look into for his definitions, but there were other sources of intellectual stimulation and diversion. At the beginning of the year, Kempe’s paper on mathematical form had played that role. In March, Wolcott Gibbs had written to Peirce to ask if he had published any results from his color experiments that had been funded fourteen years earlier by the National Academy of Sciences with a grant from its Bache Fund. Gibbs’s request seemed to reawaken Peirce’s interest in color studies and for several days beginning 4 April, he recorded results of a new series of color experiments in a notebook labeled “Hue” (1889.12). Peirce traveled to Washington D.C. during the third week of April to present a paper “On Sensations of Color” (1889.14) to the National Academy. He presented a second paper, “On Determinations of Gravity” (1889.15), in which he discussed his work with the invariable reversible pendulums he had designed. The spring issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research carried Gurney’s final reply to Peirce (sel. 19) which must have caught his attention, but with Gurney by then deceased, Peirce probably had no thought of any further response. Within a few months, however, he would take up the subject again for The Forum. And in June at Harvard’s commencement, Percival Lowell delivered the annual Phi Beta Kappa poem and took the occasion to commemorate Peirce’s father, Benjamin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell’s Peirce stanza ended: “Though but an echo find itself in verse, The Cosmos answers to the name of Peirce.”36 Charles would surely have heard of this and it could not but have reminded him that he was expected to wear his father’s mantle. No doubt he felt the irony that while such grand things were being said about his father, he was, largely by his own doing, living in exile from his father’s social world. The promise of a new life may have made things easier for Peirce, but that would not last long.
During the years covered in this volume, the one continuous focus of Peirce’s intellectual energy was his lexicographic work for the Century Dictionary, which in its first edition ran to 7046 quarto pages. He had begun writing definitions as early as 1883 and he continued with varying degrees of concentration from then on, but his most sustained and intensive effort came between 1888 and 1891. Peirce’s contribution to the Century Dictionary was massive. He was responsible for six major subject areas—logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures—but he contributed to many other areas including color terms, general philosophy, geodesy, psychology, and education (in particular, the words related to universities). Altogether he probably contributed or approved over 15,000 definitions, with many of them taking many hours of thought and research.37
From the beginning, Peirce’s lexicographic work had a decided impact on his intellectual development. At Johns Hopkins, where Peirce began working for the Century Company, he developed a course in philosophical terminology structured around his dictionary work. His desire to express usefully but as fully and accurately as possible the meanings of words such as “classification,” “color,” “continuity,” “formal,” “law,” “logic,” “nominalism,” “predicate,” “probability,” “real,” “relation,” “science,” “sign,” “theorem,” “truth,” and “university,” among many others, often led to significant developments in his ideas or in the direction of his thought. Max Fisch believed it was Peirce’s return to the Greek philosophers for his dictionary work that led him to his evolutionary metaphysics, and it is likely that some of the mathematical selections in the present volume were stimulated by his lexicographic work (e.g. sel. 40). Certainly Peirce’s increasing interest in classification, in the history of language, in the ethics of terminology, and in such matters as spelling reform, grew directly out of his work for the Century Dictionary.
It is unclear in what order Peirce took up his dictionary work, but he appears to have begun in 1883 by working his way through the Imperial Dictionary (the basis for the Century) letter by letter, pronouncing judgment on the Imperial’s treatment of his words, emending what could be saved and supplying what more was needed—often a great deal. By 1886 he had reached “Words in E” (W5: sel. 57). But Peirce also worked on his definitions by subject areas, beginning in 1883 with definitions for selected mathematical terms, followed in the intervening years by similar efforts for color terms, metrological terms, university terms, and so on. The Century was an etymological dictionary and included carefully chosen quotations to illustrate the history of the use of its words, so during these years Peirce’s intellectual purview was profoundly expansive, covering the wide range of subject areas he was responsible for and the full history of the words from those areas, from their baptisms, if that could be found out, to their most current uses. He was always on the look-out for illustrative quotations to send in to the Century Company’s New York office.
Sometime near the beginning of 1888, but perhaps not until the spring, Peirce started to receive galley proofs for his definitions. The Century began appearing in print the following year in bound fascicles of about three hundred pages. This process of working over the galleys incrementally, while publication was proceeding with earlier fascicles, would continue until the final fascicle, the twenty-fourth, was published early in 1891. By the end of November 1888, Peirce was through the first galley proofs for the F’s and on 7 January he wrote Jem that he had received a second galley for “function.” By the spring of 1890, the end of the period covered in this volume, about half of the Century was in print. Because of this piecemeal production process, from 1888 to 1891 Peirce had to revisit all of the definitions he had written during the previous five years and compose for each fascicle, as a continuing matter of priority, any definitions he had put off along the way. There is nothing that occupied Peirce more completely during these years than his dictionary work, neither his work for the Coast Survey nor his philosophical system building. It was likely this concentration that led him to set aside his “A Guess at the Riddle” manuscript, just as he seemed to have the book well in hand.
It did not take long after the first of the twenty-four slim volumes of the Century Dictionary appeared in print for reviews to follow. One lone voice of dissent was heard—the voice of Simon Newcomb. In a letter to the editor of the Nation, published on 13 June 1889, Newcomb complained of certain Century definitions that were “insufficient, inaccurate, and confused to a degree which is really remarkable.” The examples he gave were for “Almagest,” “albedo,” “eccentric anomaly,” “absorption lines,” “law of action and reaction,” “apochromatic,” “alidade,” and “achromatic lens,” five of which, it turned out, were Peirce’s. Peirce replied in the 27 June issue of the Nation, admitting that his definition of “anomaly,” “perhaps the first I wrote in astronomy,” was flawed, but defending the rest. Newcomb confessed to great surprise when he found out it was Peirce he had taken to task, but privately, in a letter to William D. Whitney, Editor in Chief for the Century, he wrote: “I may say to you confidentially that several years ago I should have regarded Peirce as the ablest man in the country for such work but I fear he has since deteriorated to an extent which is truly lamentable.”38 A few days earlier, Whitney