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Notes
See C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry 1851 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 11–17.
When James Martineau was compiling his Hymns for the Christian Church and Home (1840) he had invited Ogden — who had received part of his education from Rev. Joseph Hutton, father of Richard and John, and who had become a Unitarian — to supply tunes of unusual metre. The result was Holy Songs and Musical Prayers (1842) which incurred considerable criticism as it included adaptations as hymn tunes of pieces by Beethoven and other composers.
M. B. Simey, Charitable Effort in Liverpool in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 1951) p. 25.
Cf. L. G. Johnson, General T. Perronet Thompson (1957).
See G. E. Evans, A History of Renshaw Street Chapel (1887) p. 97.
An account of the formal opening of the Houses by Queen Victoria on 3 February 1852 is contained in the Annual Register … of the Year 1852 (1853), Chronicle, 17.
Probably a reference to the news of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état against the second French Republic on 2 December 1851, which was received in England by electric telegraph. A cable had been laid between Dover and Calais in 1851.
cf. E. H. Madden, ‘W. S. Jevons on Induction and Probability’, in Blake, Ducasse and Madden, Theories of Scientific Method (Seattle, 1960), pp. 233–47,
B. MacLennan, ‘Jevons’s Philosophy of Science,’ Manchester School, 60 (March 1972) pp. 53–71,
R. D. Collison Black, ‘Jevons, Bentham and De Morgan,’ Economica, 34 (May 1972) pp. 119–134.
Cf. S. Dowell, History of Taxation and Taxes in England (1884) iv 328–34.
Cf. L. T. C. Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1957) pp. 201–16.
Cf. J. Hughes, Liverpool Banks and Bankers 1760–1837 (1906) pp. 189–200.
Cf. obituary, the Adelaide Advertiser (31 August 1900).
W. A. Miller did not give evidence in this suit, Gillespie v. Russel, known as ‘The Torbane-hill Case’, heard in Edinburgh before the Lord President on 29 and 30 July and 1–4 August 1853.
Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies, with a glimpse of the Gold-Fields, 3 vols (1852).
J. C. Byrne, Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies, from 1835–1847, 2 vols (1848).
Cf. C. J. Singer, A History of Technology, IV, The Industrial Revolution c. 1750 to c. 1850 (Oxford, 1958) pp. 579–80, 592.
Cf. A. J. Ihde, The Development of Modern Chemistry (New York, 1964) p. 467.
Cf. Karl Pearson, Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (Cambridge, 1914–30) 11, 150.
J. Thomsen, ‘Die Grundzuge eines thermo-chemischen Systems’, Annalen der Physik und Chemie, LXXXVIII (Leipzig, 1853) 349–62;
See J. R. Partington, History of Chemistry, 4 (1964) 446–452.
H. Kolbe, ‘Critical Observations on Williamson’s Theory of Water, Ethers, and Acids’, Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, VII (1854) 111–121.
Heinrich Rose (1795–1864), Professor of Chemistry at Berlin from 1835; the third generation in a family of chemists; with his brother Gustav, a mineralogist at the University of Berlin, made important contributions in the fields of inorganic, analytical and mineralogical chemistry; published a large number of papers, most of which appeared in the Annalen der Physik, edited from 1824 by his friend J. C. Poggendorf.
Richard Doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson, being the History of what they saw and did in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy (1854). Doyle (1824–83) had already depicted their comic adventures in England and on the Rhine in Punch, for which he worked as an illustrator, 1843–50.
(R. W. Bunsen, Gasometrische Methoden, Brunswick, 1857.) Gasometry. Comprising the leading physical and chemical properties of gases. Translated by Henry E. Roscoe (1857).
W.J. Russell, ‘On a New Method of Estimating Sulphur’, Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, VII (1854) 212–15. See above, Letter 38, n. 16, p. 74.
— A. H. Dodd, The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (Cardiff, 1933), p. 168.
Cf. also E. Rosalie Jones, History of Barmouth (Barmouth, 1909) pp. 194–205;
R. I. Murchison, Siluria. The history of the oldest known rocks containing organic remains, with a brief sketch of the distribution of gold over the earth (1854) pp. 433–4;
A. C. Ramsay, ‘On the Geology of the Gold-bearing District of Merionethshire, North Wales’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, X (1854) 242–7.
Cf. G. Duveen and H. G. Stride, The History of the Gold Sovereign (1962) pp. 77–95;
Cf. Samuel Ashton Thompson Yates, Memorials of the Family of the Rev. Jhon Yates, (privately printed, 1890).
Cf. C. Jones, British Merchant Ship** (1923) pp. 25–33.
Cf. Clive Turnbull, Bonanza: the story of George Francis Train (Melbourne, 1946).
H. Ryan, ‘Reports upon the Irish Peat Industries’, Economic Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, 1 (Dublin, 1899–1909) 1–72, 371–420, 465–546;
Cf. G. Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended (Melbourne, 1963) pp. 46–56.
G. Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why (1953).
H. E. Roscoe, ‘On the Absorption of Chlorine in Water’, Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, VIII (1856) 14–27.
Cf. Mrs Russell Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot (1914) pp. 179–80.
Jane, third daughter of Thomas Roscoe (1791–1871) William Roscoe’s fifth son. She was authoress of: Audubon, the naturalist, in the New World (1856);
Englishwomen and the Age (1860);
Masaniello of Naples. The record of a nine days’ revolution (1865);
The Court of Anna Carofa; an historical narrative (1872).
R. I. Murchison, Siluria. The history of the oldest known rocks containing organic remains, with a brief sketch of the distribution of Gold ovdr the Earth (1854).
Cf. H. Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (1964), pp. 164–5, 184–97.
Fremantle and Wilson, Memorandum on the Mint, Pari. Papers 1870 (7) xli; Vol. III, Letters 322 and 323.
-J. Harris: Dolgelly, March 28’. Mining Journal… 31 March 1855, no. 1023 (xxv).
Cf. S. G. Checkland’s comment: ‘There appears to have been a strong disposition to confine attention to problems of selling, rather than to think about new products and new processes. The iron masters were subject to very great vicissitudes of trade, so that, in improving times the urgent task was to get the works into full operation, while in bad times, with excess capacity, there was neither the incentive nor the means for improvement in plant… It was part of the game that iron masters must accept losses in depression, to be made up in good times. This meant that, as prices began to recover, the producer sought to hold back output until a remunerative price was obtained … the iron master had to enter upon the expansion with as few old orders on his books as possible, for new orders at higher prices were his aim.…’ The Rise of Industrial Society in England 1815–1885 (1964) pp. 154–5.
Cf. R. Dickinson, ‘James Nasmyth and the Liverpool Iron Trade’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 108 (1957) 83–104.
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselass, Prince of Ahissinia (1759).
see N. Davey, ‘The Decimal Coinage Controversy in England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1957,)
see D. P. O’Brien, The Correspondence of Lord Overstone (Cambridge, 1971) 152–9.
The idea of the force of gravitation explaining other phenomena beyond the motion of the planets was not a new one. C. L. Berthollet (1748–1822), in his Researches into the Laws of Chemical Affinity (Paris, 1801) (Engl. translation Farrell, Baltimore, 1804), thought that the forces responsible for chemical combination were gravitational in origin, and assigned differences between astronomical and chemical attractions to the different scale of distances at which they acted. However, it had been recognised for some time before 1855 that the chemical phenomena which Jevons is here discussing would require explanation in terms of repulsive as well as attractive forces.
Luke Howard (1772–1864), The Climate of London, 2 vols (1818–20);
Essay on the modification of clouds (1830).
The results of Jevons’s researches in this field were contained in his paper ‘On a Sungauge or New Actinometer’, published in the Sydney Magazine, August 1857. See below, Letter 107, n. 8, p. 297.
R. W. Bunsen, H. E. Roscoe, ‘Photochemical Researches’, Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, VIII (1856) 193–211.
W. C. Wittwer, ‘Ueber die Einwirkung des Lichts auf Chlorwasser’, Annalen der Physik und Chemie, XCIV (Leipzig, 1855) 597–612.
Cf. J. A. La Nauze, ‘Jevons in Sydney’, Political Economy in Australia (Melbourne, 1949) pp. 41–2.
Sir Arthur Helps, Friends in Council: a series of readings and discourse thereon, 2 vols (1847).
Charles Child Spencer, A Rudimentary and Practical Treatise on Music, 2 vols (1850).
John Weale (1791–1862), London bookseller, published Weale’s Rudimentary Series in four parts (1849–50).
See Vol. I, p. 87, n. 2. Gerhardt was Professor of Chemistry at Strasbourg, 1855–6; the book to which H. E. Roscoe referred was probably Traité de Chimie organique: 4 Tom. 1853–6).
See above, Letter 35, n. 4, p. 64. A. Cahours, A. W. Hofmann, ‘Note on a new Class of Alcohols’, London … Philosophical Magazine, XII (October 1856) 309–14.
Robert Dundas Thomson (1810–64), eldest son of James Thomson (1768–1855) editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; M.D. Glasgow, 1831; deputy Professor of Chemistry there, 1841–52; F.R.S. 1854; he was lecturer in chemistry at St Thomas’s Hospital and Medical Officer of Health for Marylebone, 1856.
Cf. L. C. B. Gower, The Principles of Modern Company Law (1969), pp. 40–50.
Probably Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation (1844). Chambers (1802–71), joint founder of the publishing firm, wrote and published the work anonymously.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855).
On 11 July 1856 Pell had read a paper to the Sydney Philosophical Society, entitled ‘On the Application of Certain Principles of Political Economy to the Question of Railways’. The text of this paper appears in the Sydney Magazine of Science and Art, 1 (1857) 124–8.
James Hutton (1726–97), Scottish geologist; devoted himself to scientific pursuits after abandoning medicine; his ‘Theory of Rain’ was published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, III (1794) but his work was little recognised until the publication of John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory (1802).
Professor Smith read his paper ‘On the action of Sydney Water upon Lead’ before the Society on 13 August 1856.
Henry M. Witt, ‘On the Variations in the Chemical Composition of the Thames Water, during the year between May 1855 and May 1856’, London … Philosophical Magazine, XII (August 1856) 114–24. Witt was Assistant Chemist to the Government School of Applied Science at this time.
John Tyndall (1820–93), Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, 1853–87; scientific adviser to Trinity House and the Board of Trade, 1866–83. His paper, ‘Comparative View of the Cleavage of Crystals and Slate Rocks’, was published in the London … Philosophical Magazine, XII (July 1856) 35–48; it had been delivered at the Royal Institution on 6 June 1856.
Felice Orsini, The Austrian Dungeons in Italy. A narrative of fifteen months’ imprisonment and final escape from the fortress of S. Giorgio. Translated from the unpublished manuscript by J. M. White (1856).
Jevons mentions in his diary reading Austrian Dungeons in Italy in December 1856.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Boston, 1856).
The Saturday Review, owned by Beresford Hope (1820–87) and edited by J. D. Cook (1808–68), had commenced publication in 1855.
Cf. Leslie Stephen, Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1895);
Merle M. Bevington, The Saturday Review, 1855–1868 (New York, 1941).
Morris Barnett, The Serious Family. A comedy in three aāts (1849).
Marmion Savage, The Bachelor of the Albany (1848).
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1st Baron Macaulay), History of England, 5 vols (1849–61).
Jevons is probably referring to Natural Phenomena (1850), a pocket-sized volume published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge; it contains thirty short chapters, with illustrations, on such subjects as rainbows, aurora borealis, coral reefs, glaciers, volcanoes, etc.
Possibly William Ellery Channing, Lectures on the elevation of the labouring portion of the Community (Boston, 1840).
Johann Tauler (c. 1300–1361). The history and life of the Rev. Doctor John Tauler of Strasbourg; with twenty-five of his sermons (temp. 1340). Translated from the German, with additional notices of Tauler’s life and times, by Susanna Winkworth … and a preface by the Rev. Charles Kingsley (1857).
H. Pouillet, ‘Ueber die Sonnenwarme, das Strahlungs — und Absorptionsvermögen der atmosphärischen Luft, und die Temperatur des Weltraums’, Annalen der Physik und Chemie, XLV (Leipzig, 1838) 25–57.
J. Mueller, Lehrbuch der Physik und Meteorologie, 3 vols (Brunswick, 1856–8), III, Lehrbuch der kosmischen physik.
J. F. W. Herschel, Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews: with addresses and other pieces (1857) p. 145.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 4th edition (1857).
Charlotte Bronte used the name ‘Currer Bell’ for the publication of Jane Eyre (1847). When novels by the other sisters were also ascribed to this author, Charlotte had to give up her anonymity in order to prove that this was not the case, Shirley was published in 1849.
R. W. Bunsen and H. E. Roscoe, ‘Photochemical Researches: Part 1. Measurement of the chemical action of light. Part 11. Phenomena of photochemical induction. Part iii. Optical and chemical extinction of the chemical rays’, Philosophical Transactions (1857), 355–402, 601–20.
Cf. Dampier, A History of Science (1968 ed.) p. 229.
Thomas Graham, Elements of Chemistry (assisted by H. Watts), second edition, entirely revised and enlarged 2 vols (1847).
Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols (1857).
Cf. R. B. Barton, G. M. Thompson, A Short History of the Sydney Philharmonic Society (Sydney, 1903), pp. 1–2.
Cf. B. Rodgers, ‘The Social Science Association, 1857–1886’, Manchester School, XX (September 1952) 283–310.
Jevons appears to have been engaged here in a further controversy with the Rev. Mr Scott concerning geological theory, centred on the Rev. George Wight’s Geology and Genesis: A Reconciliation of the two Records (1857).
These included Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Journal of an expedition into the interior of tropical Australia, in search of a route to the Gulf of Carpentaria (1848),
Probably Weber’s Auffordung zum Tanz, op. 65 (1819).
This probably formed the basis of ‘Gold Assay’, one of a number of articles which he contributed to Henry Watts’ Dictionary of Chemistry between January and August 1861.
R. W. Bunsen and H. E. Roscoe, ‘Photochemical Researches — Part iv. Comparative and absolute measurement of the chemical rays. Chemical action of diffuse daylight. Chemical action of direct sunlight. Photochemical action of the sun compared with that of a terrestrial source of light. Chemical action of the constituent parts of solar light’, Philosophical Transactions [1859], vol. 149, 879–926.
See H. Westergaard, Contributions to the History of Statistics (1932).
James William Waugh (1820–67); son of an Edinburgh bookseller, he emigrated to New South Wales in 1840; published the Sydney Magazine of Science and Art, 1857–9,
Cf. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, edited by Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas (New York, 1952), vol. II, 114; vol. III, 522.
Frederick Jevons was employed by Rathbone Brothers, the Liverpool ship** and trading company; for an account of the firm at this period see S. Marriner, ‘Rathbones’ Trading Activities in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 108, (1957) 105–27.
Cf. K. Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America 1815–1908 (1967), pp. 62–6, 178–81.
On the relation of this work to Jevons’s earlier studies in mathematics, see Black, Ecomonica, 38 (May 1972) 119–34.
La Nauze, ‘The Conception of Jevons’s Utility Theory’, Economica, XX (Nov 1953) 356–8.
See Edward [Lord Justice] Fry, Theodore Waterhouse, 1838–1891; Notes of his life and extracts from his letters and papers (printed for private circulation only, 1894).
There seems no reason to question Keynes’s identification of this work as William Playfair’s The Commercial and Political Atlas, representing, by means of stained copperplate charts, the exports, imports and general trade of England; the national debt and other public accounts; with observations and remarks … (1786).
Cf. Clapham, The Bank of England (1944) 11 257, 429.
Although Jevons’s cousin by marriage, Richard Holt Hutton, was soon to become joint editor and proprietor of the Spectator, North of England middle-class families like the Jevonses had a double reason for disapproving of the paper at this time; no friend to the Manchester School and its members, it was also a consistent advocate of the Northern cause in the American Civil War. Later in 1861, ‘it welcomed John Bright as an ally in the Federalist cause’ — W. B. Thomas, The Story of the Spectator, 1828–1928 (1928), p. 191.
See A. M. Clarke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (1895);
H. Macpherson, Herschel (1919).
J. F. W. Herschel, ‘Meteorology’, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1861).
Henry Aldrich (1647–1710), Dean of Christ Church, produced his Artis Logicae Compendium in 1691, but it remained a popular textbook in the nineteenth century.
Henry Longueville Mansel (1820–71), tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and follower of Sir William Hamilton in metaphysics, had produced a much modified version of Aldrich’s work, under the title Artis Logicae Rudimenta, which reached a fourth issue in 1862.
Gottfried Wilhelm, freiherr von Leibniz (1646–1716), La Monadologie (1714).
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Critique of Pure Reason (1781); the translation used by Jevons was probably that by J. M. D. Meiklejohn (1852).
Paul Belloni du Chaillu (1835–1903), explorer, son of a French merchant in Gabon, where he was brought up; went to the United States in 1852, becoming a naturalised citizen; 1856–60, travelled 8000 miles through Central Africa on an expedition sponsored by the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, encountering anthropoid apes, at that time virtually unknown to Western Science, and bringing back several gorillas. His account of the journey, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), was received with great suspicion.
Stebbing Shaw, The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire … vols 1 and 2, part 1 (1798–1801).
Cf. F. E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent. The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838 (University of North Carolina, 1944).
Although the original manuscript of this letter is among the Jevons Papers, the information it contained appears to have been communicated in some way as several of the items listed are now in the collections of the British Museum: A collection of miscellaneous documents relating to the Thames Tunnel, comprising Acts of Parliament, reports, views, manuscript letters, etc. (1824–53);
Tanner’s Melbourne Directory for 1859 (Melbourne, 1859);
Huxtable’s Ballarat Commercial Directory for 1857 (Ballarat, 1857–8);
Cox & Co.’s Sydney Post Office Directory, 1857 (Sydney, 1857);
The Sydney Magazine of Science and Art… 2 vols (Sydney, 1858–9);
F. Sinnett, Account of the ‘Rush’ to Port Curtis … (Geelong, 1859);
N. Pidgeon, The Life Experience and Journal of N. Pidgeon, City Missionary … (Sydney, 1857).
See below, Letter 167, n. 7, p. 459. Richard Hutton, editor of The Economist, 1858–61, had by this time taken over The Spectator but he apparently still did reviews for The Economist. Walter Bagehot, its editor 1826–77, was a close friend and it seems likely that Hutton would have persuaded him to provide space for a review of Jevons’s diagrams.
Cf. A. Buchan, The Spare Chancellor. The Life of Walter Bagehot (1959) p. 127;
Henry Dunning Macleod, ‘On the Definition and Nature of the Science of Political Economy’, Report of the Thirty-second Meeting of the British Association … held at Cambridge in October, 1862. Transactions of the Sections, 160–61.
Cf. Black, Manchester School, 30 (September, 1962) 205.
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Black, R.D.C. (1973). Letters. In: Black, R.D.C. (eds) Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00714-1_1
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