2) to seven hundred people. He wrote to his brother James Mills (Jem) that he doubted he would attract “a single pupil from so small a number,” but letters of interest began to come in. Records for the course are very incomplete, so it is difficult to tell how many responded or exactly what the content of the course was, but it is clear that by the end of March Peirce had received more than fifteen inquiries and at least eight students had begun lessons. While far from what Peirce needed to make a living, and certainly not enough to let him resign from the Survey, the response was promising and indicated that a major promotional effort could succeed. Peirce imagined an army of agents dispersed throughout the country, all soliciting students to sign up for his course. He drew up directions for agents (sel. 5) which bring to mind the hucksterism of turn-of-the-century medicine peddlers or of modern telephone solicitors: “The levers upon which you have to rely are first, cupidity, second, shame, and third, fatigue.” Still, there is no doubt that Peirce believed he could deliver good value for the price of his course, and from what can be reconstructed from the fragments that remain (see sels. 3–13), that belief seems justified.
Peirce’s plan for the correspondence course was set out in his circular (sel. 2) and his follow-up letter (sel. 3). The course would be divided into three parts—traditional logic, mathematical reasoning, and scientific reasoning—and the full course would require a minimum of one hundred and eighty letters. From the exercise sets that have survived—only a small part of the series Peirce had prepared—and from surviving student letters, it is possible to get a sense of what Peirce taught and how he interacted with his students. He seems to have gone to some lengths to address his students’ individual interests and capabilities, but it is likely that he was aiming too high. Certainly the reasoning exercises (sel. 9) and the three lessons in Boolean algebra with additional exercises (sels. 10 and 13) involved rather high-level logical content; there is a one-page fragment (in RL 100) that indicates that Peirce even hoped to convey some of his favorite philosophical ideas through his reasoning exercises. For example, the second exercise from the fragment gives a brief lesson in Peirce’s theory of signs:
Let us use the word “sign” to mean anything which on being perceived carries to a mind some cognition or thought which is applicable to some object. Thus, I would call a portrait a sign. I would call a pointing finger a sign. I would call a spoken sentence a sign. I now ask you to make a list of a good many different kinds of signs, and to attempt to classify them according to their different modes of standing for their objects. To do this will require a good deal of thought.
Such questions might well serve the purpose of evaluating student preparedness but they seem aimed at minds more elastic and capable than might be expected to turn out in the large numbers Peirce expected. Still, a letter he wrote at the end of March to J. M. Hantz of Northwestern University indicates continuing enthusiasm for his course and reveals no dissatisfaction with his initial students:
It is my fate to be supposed an extreme partisan of formal logic, and so I began. But the study of the logic of relations has converted me from that error. Formal logic centers its whole attention on the least important part of reasoning, a part so mechanical that it may be performed by a machine, and fancies that that is all there is in the mental process. For my part, I hold that reasoning is the observation of relations, mainly by means of diagrams and the like. It is a living process. This is the point of view from which I am conducting my instruction in the art of reasoning. I find out and correct all the pupil’s bad habits in thinking; I teach him that reasoning is not done by the unaided brain, but needs the cooperation of the eyes and hands. Reasoning, as I make him see, is a kind of experimentation, in which, instead of relying on the intelligible laws of outward nature to bring out the result, we depend on the equally hidden laws of inward association. I initiate him into the art of this experimentation. I familiarize him with the use of all kinds of diagrams and devices for aiding the imagination. I show him just what part abstract thought has in the process—a quite subsidiary one.
Peirce added that he assigns his students “a large number and great variety of exercises in dealing with real facts” and that “the invention of these exercises is the thing for which I hope to be remembered, for I believe they are destined to exert no little influence in the future.” In the years that followed, as Peirce used his exercise sets for other purposes, the package of exercises was broken up and dispersed. The small set that has been reassembled (sels. 9,10,13) is at best an indication of what Peirce was so proud of, as many of the exercises derive from other authors. Had Peirce’s students successfully worked their way through all of his lessons, they would likely have become the proficient reasoners he promised, but in the end no one ever finished the course. Peirce did carry on with a few students for a year or two, and later even tried to revive the course, but his lack of capital from the outset and his move to Milford in April thwarted any real chance for success.
Still, in the spring of 1887, prospects seemed good, though Peirce’s circumstances were becoming more and more difficult. New York was an expensive place to live and Peirce’s salary from the Survey was barely enough to maintain a satisfactory lifestyle. With enough paying students he would have welcomed separation from the Survey, but with only a handful he could not afford to resign. Unfortunately, his Survey work, now confined to the reduction of observation data—which in better times would have been handled by computing assistants—was extremely time-consuming, and severely limited the time he could spend answering letters and promoting his logic course. More disturbing, starting in September of 1886 a crisis had been brewing over the report on pendulum operations from the ill-fated Greely Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic, and Peirce was caught in the middle of it.5 In 1881, then Lieutenant Adolphus Greely led an Army expedition of twenty-five men to the northeastern part of Ellesmere Island to establish a scientific station above the 81st parallel at Fort Conger off Lady Franklin Bay. Greely’s party had been organized to participate in the first International Polar Year, an eleven-nation effort to advance earth science in the Arctic and Antarctic during 1882–83. The astronomer for Greely’s party, Sergeant Edward Israel, had been specially trained by Peirce in the use of pendulums for gravity determinations, and for sixteen days in January 1882 he diligently swung Peirce Pendulum No. 1 in a specially constructed ice shelter. Greely’s party met with disaster when supply ships failed to reach Fort Conger in 1882 and 1883, and when a navy vessel finally reached the retreating expedition about two hundred miles south of Lady Franklin Bay at Cape Sabine in June 1884, only seven men had survived and only six would make it home. Throughout the agonizing final winter, with starvation threatening his men, Greely took great pains to preserve the scientific data obtained at such a high price. Knowing that the heavy pendulum was a dangerous burden as his party retreated from Fort Conger to Cape Sabine, Greely had given his men the option of abandoning it, but they had declined. Fearing that his party’s camp might be missed by the much hoped-for relief expedition, he sent a party on 23 October 1883 to a prominent point on an island a few miles south of Cape Sabine in Payer Harbor to cache the records. Peirce’s pendulum, sealed in its case, was erected as a towering marker over the cache (see woodcut on p. 219).
The rescue of the expedition made international headlines, and Greely became an instant celebrity. There was some initial concern that the tragedy might have resulted from poor judgment on his part, and it was rumored that the survivors had resorted to cannibalism, but Greely was quickly exonerated. However, discord over the cost of the expedition and rescue troubled President Arthur and Secretary of War Lincoln, and they remained cool to Greely and even used his disaster as an opportunity to argue against future federal support for dangerous scientific missions. Not until Cleveland was elected President would Greely be duly recognized for his achievement and promoted first to Captain in 1886 and then to Brigadier General in 1887. The initial controversy over his leadership and the attempt to use his misfortune as an argument against federal support for science made Greely very sensitive to any criticism of his party's achievements.
In his first dispatch following the rescue, Greely had stated with much satisfaction that his party had saved and brought back the records of the meteorological, tidal, astronomical, magnetic, and pendulum observations, and he mentioned proudly that he had brought back the pendulum. In the 19 September 1884 issue of Science, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science proclaimed that “nothing in the annals of scientific heroism exceeded the devotion of those hungry men in sticking to that ponderous