Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 8. Charles S. Peirce

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СКАЧАТЬ to supplement his income. Peirce’s relations with Juliette had never recovered from the blow of his termination from Johns Hopkins in 1884 which had plunged the newly married couple into the first of many financial crises. For a while after their move to Milford things looked up, especially after their finances were augmented with inheritances from the estates of Peirce’s mother and his Aunt Lizzie. Charles and Juliette had been accepted into the high society of Milford, primarily the social circle that revolved around the prominent Pinchot family, and they were determined to live accordingly. By the end of 1889, the Peirces had invested nearly all of their assets in the old John T. Quick homestead, “Wanda Farm” (or “Quicktown”), and in surrounding woodland, altogether amounting to nearly 2000 acres. They had risked everything on the prospect of generating a good income from their new estate, from farming and from harvesting the timber and other natural resources, and perhaps from turning the old Wanda Farm, on the banks of the Delaware River, into a grand resort. This would have been a good plan had a projected bridge been built at Port Jervis to bring through a rail line from New York, but the bridge project failed and the Peirces ran out of reserves too soon to have any chance of success.

      After his separation from Johns Hopkins in 1884, Peirce’s principal source of income was the Coast and Geodetic Survey, but he also drew significant supplemental pay for his work on the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia as the contributing editor in charge of definitions in the fields of logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures. But Peirce’s income from the Century Company did not make up for the loss of his salary from Johns Hopkins and, to make matters worse, Peirce was well aware that his position with the Survey was at risk. He therefore tried his best to add to his income. He convinced Wendell Phillips Garrison, the editor of the Nation, to give him more books for review and, during the period covered by this volume, over three dozen reviews or notes by Peirce appeared in the Nation (many duplicated in the New York Evening Post). Garrison paid Peirce well for his contributions and he proved to be a crucial source for supplementing Peirce’s income for several years to come. Peirce tried to form dependable connections of this kind with other periodical publishers (Charles R. Miller, Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times, and L. S. Metcalf, editor of the Forum²) but with little success. Desperate for additional funds, he sought loans from friends and acquaintances and he tried his hand at inventions and various investment schemes, with no luck.³ He was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to market his expertise. He was for instance a regular patron of the Astor Library, New York’s largest reference library (in 1895 it would be consolidated to form the New York Public Library). Sometime in May 1890 he presented the library with a detailed list of missing “works on mathematical subjects” which he thought especially important and he offered to continue his efforts, probably hoping to be a paid consultant.⁴ His offer was declined; on 4 June 1890, he received a letter from Trustee Thomas M. Markoe thanking him for his “very full & valuable list” but letting him know that he “need give [him]self no further trouble about the matter.”

      In May or early June 1890 Juliette arrived back in New York and the Peirces returned to their Pennsylvania home. Their return to Wanda Farm freed Peirce for a time from the daily hustle and allowed him to refocus his priorities. His work for the Coast Survey and the Century Company was the most pressing.

      The Century Dictionary, hailed as the “most conspicuous literary monument of the nineteenth century,”⁵ was not only a dictionary of historical and common English usage but was distinguished by its comprehensive inclusion of scientific terms and was said to embody “the scientific spirit and work” of its time.⁶ Peirce had been recruited for the dictionary project while still teaching at Johns Hopkins and had begun drafting definitions as early as 1883, but his most intensive and sustained work began around 1888, when he began receiving proofs, and ran at least until the fall of 1891, when the first printing of the dictionary was completed. The first edition ran to 7,046 large quarto pages, included nearly half-a-million definitions for over 215,000 words, and as a measure of its encyclopedic scope was reported to contain “from a printer’s point of view” two-thirds as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Even after the Century Dictionary was published, Peirce continued with his lexicographical work, writing corrections and new definitions in his interleaved copy and hoping to be paid on a per-word basis for a supplement that would eventually appear in 1909.⁷ Peirce would also look for other dictionary work and would propose various lexicographical projects. As the Century was nearing completion, Peirce tried for a position with Funk & Wagnalls to help with their famous single-volume Standard Dictionary, which would appear in 1894, and in 1892 he would draw up a “Plan for a Scientific Dictionary” that would provide a summary of human knowledge in 1500 pages (sel. 50). It is hard to overstate the importance of Peirce’s lexicographical work, not only for the income it produced but especially for its impact on Peirce’s intellectual development.

      In July 1889 Thomas Corwin Mendenhall was appointed Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. His predecessor, Frank M. Thorn, was a lawyer with no scientific training who had been appointed four years earlier to reform the Survey. In contrast, and to the relief of many government scientists, Mendenhall was a trained scientist and was expected to restore the Survey’s leadership in scientific research; certainly that was Peirce’s hope. Peirce’s career had been dedicated to advancing the theoretical foundations of geodetic science and his field work had always been conducted with the greatest care, using the most refined instruments, so that his results could contribute not only to the immediate practical needs of economic and social life but also to the growth of the science. Under his leadership, American gravity research took its place alongside the best gravity research in Europe. But the turn away from pure research that the Survey had taken under Thorn could not be reversed in the political and economic climate of the times and Peirce and Mendenhall soon reached an impasse.⁸

      Peirce had good reasons for being discontented with the Survey’s administration, especially under Thorn, but his unveiled discontent got him off to a bad start with Mendenhall, who regarded Peirce as uncooperative and set in his ways. It did not help that Peirce had been working for over three years to prepare the results of extensive field operations conducted from 1882 through 1886 for publication in what was expected to be his second major gravity report. This report had been a major source of conflict between Peirce and Thorn and it is certain that Thorn told Mendenhall that it was long overdue. Mendenhall would also have been aware that Peirce was working as a major contributor to the Century Dictionary project, then in its most demanding production phase, and that Peirce may have had too many irons in the fire. And Mendenhall would have known Thorn’s reservations about the quality of the overdue report and read about Peirce’s decision to reverse “the usual order of presentation in a scientific memoir by stating the conclusions before the premises.” When Peirce finally submitted his completed report on 20 November 1889, Mendenhall decided to have it reviewed for “form, matter, meaning and suitability for publication.” When Peirce and Juliette returned to Milford the following spring, Peirce had still heard nothing back from Mendenhall about plans for publication.

      An exchange of letters between Mendenhall and Peirce in July illustrates the impasse they had reached. On 30 June, Mendenhall wrote to Peirce asking him for a definite value for “the force of gravity” for Ithaca, the place of one of the four main gravity stations dealt with in the report that was under review. Physics students at Cornell needed this figure as a constant for their laboratory work. All of relevance that Mendenhall could find in Peirce’s report was a “nearly unintelligible use of the so-called ‘logarithmic second’ which … renders the discussion uselessly and unnecessarily obscure.” Peirce replied quickly to explain how to derive the desired value from the data in his report; he lamented that the result would be at least one ten thousandth too small because he had not received the new pendulums he had requested for flexure corrections (3 July 1890), and wrote later to criticize Mendenhall’s conception of gravity as a force “calling for expression in dynes” (22 July 1890). Peirce argued that gravity should really be understood as a measure of acceleration and strongly defended his use of logarithmic seconds. Mendenhall replied that his disagreement with Peirce was not one СКАЧАТЬ