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 had written to his brother that he did not understand why Newcomb felt “called upon to strain the truth and misjudge things in order to find fault” with the dictionary. “It seems,” he went on, “as if he must have some private grudge to satisfy.”39 But Newcomb’s criticism quickly faded out against the countervailing tide of acclaim. Overall Peirce was quite satisfied with the results of his work, even though he would often remark, as he did to Paul Carus on 25 September 1890, “God forbid I should approve of above 1/10 of what I insert.”
The second major preoccupation of Peirce in 1889 was the preparation of scientific reports for the Coast Survey. For years he had accumulated gravity data with painstaking effort and at great expense, and beginning about 1887 had been trying to prepare results for publication. He had not published a major report since 1884, and that was a report on gravity determinations made in Pennsylvania in 1879 and 1880 (W5: sel. 1). Since then he had published some smaller reports, mainly on theory (e.g. W5: sels. 42, 43, 51–53) and, of course, his report on pendulum operations at Ft. Conger, but his principal gravity findings since 1880 remained unpublished. Most importantly, with the exception of the Greely report, these included all of the gravity work carried out with the Peirce invariable reversible pendulums. These unpublished results involved ten stations, six running along a north-south line between Montreal and Key West (including Albany, Hoboken, Ft. Monroe, and St. Augustine), three along an east-west line between Ithaca and Madison (including Ann Arbor), and the base station at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., which provided the constants for all the Peirce pendulum operations.
In addition to reports on gravity work involving the Peirce pendulums, results still had to be worked up for earlier operations with Repsold or Kater pendulums at Hoboken, Cambridge, and Baltimore and for some of Peirce’s early gravity work with less refined pendulums in Massachusetts (at the Hoosac Tunnel, Northampton, and Cambridge). Also, there were at least three volumes of unreduced data from observations made at Paris, Geneva, and Kew during Peirce’s final trip to Europe in 1883. All of these records together, in their raw data form, filled more than one hundred volumes of pendulum transit records and scores of chronograph sheets recording time observations.
Finally, in conjunction with his principal work of determining gravity, Peirce had applied his results to the problem of determining the shape of the earth and had made many studies and investigations of such issues as the flexure of the pendulum staff and the effect of air resistance (involving hydrodynamical theory). For that, too, he needed to prepare reports.
Peirce had begun in earnest reducing data and writing a report on operations with the Peirce pendulums in the fall of 1886, after being relieved of field duty, but his attention had soon turned to the Greely report. Upon settling in Milford, Peirce turned again to the preparation of the report he believed would carry forward the U.S. contribution to geodesy he had initiated with his 1876 “Report on Gravity at Initial Stations” (W4: sel. 13) and his “Determinations of Gravity at Allegheny, Ebensburgh, and York, Pa., in 1879 and 1880” (W5: sel. 1). His plan in June 1887 was to write first a report on what he thought was the best work done with the Peirce pendulums, the results from Ithaca, Madison, Ann Arbor, Key West, and perhaps Fort Monroe, and to give “a full account” of the pendulums, including a discussion of their theory and of the work that had been done at the Smithsonian, the base station, to determine their constants. Then, for a separate report, he planned to prepare the results from Hoboken, Albany, Montreal, and St. Augustine, also done with Peirce pendulums, but not “in the last approved way” (9 June 1887).40 But by the end of the year, Peirce had decided to organize the work into two series of stations grouped by their approximate location on either the same east-west or north-south meridian. After he finished his reports on work with the Peirce pendulums, he planned to clean up the remaining backlog.
Peirce went to work on the report for the east-west series of stations and wrote to Thorn on 28 June 1887 that it was “shaping up” and that he would soon have a draft ready,
