Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce. He graduated from Harvard and its Lawrence Scientific School in chemistry, and for some thirty years worked for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, chiefly on pendulum measurements of gravity. In the early 1870s he belonged to the informal Metaphysical Club in Cambridge with William James, Chauncey Wright and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and from 1879 to 1884 he lectured on logic at Johns Hopkins University. He wrote prolifically on logic, mathematics, probability and the theory of signs, published comparatively little in book form, and spent his last decades at Milford, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1914.
Illustrations of the Logic of Science is a series of six essays that Charles Sanders Peirce published in Popular Science Monthly between November 1877 and August 1878. Written for a general educated readership, they set out a theory of inquiry, a rule for clarifying the meaning of ideas, a frequency account of probability, and a three-part classification of inference.
