Elementary Lessons in Logic (Jevons, 1870)

A widely reprinted Victorian logic primer by W. Stanley Jevons, first published 1870 (Macmillan), stereotyped and reissued essentially unchanged for decades — the vault has read the 1881 "New Edition" printing, digitized by Darwin Online. It teaches deductive and inductive logic in numbered "Lessons," including Lesson X on conversion of propositions (pp.81–87) and Lesson XV, "The Rules of the Syllogism" (pp.126–131), each stating rules Jevons numbers explicitly.

Matters to this vault as the confirmed source text behind Herbert Austin Aikins's page-cited quotations of Jevons in his 1902 Principles of Logic — Aikins's "Jevons, p. 82," "Jevons, p. 83," and his footnoted "eight numbered rules... as stated by Jevons" all trace to specific sentences in this book, not a paraphrase or a different Jevons title. See claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-lesson-x-source-of-aikins-conversion-rule-citations, claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-lesson-xv-source-of-aikins-eight-syllogism-rules, and claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-1881-printing-toc-confirms-stable-pagination-since-1870 — resolving question-verify-aikins-1902-jevons-source-edition-for-conversion-and-syllogism-rules.

References

• claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-lesson-x-source-of-aikins-conversion-rule-citations

• claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-lesson-xv-source-of-aikins-eight-syllogism-rules

• claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-1881-printing-toc-confirms-stable-pagination-since-1870

• claim-aikins-1902-ch11-quotes-jevons-conversion-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-rule-following

• claim-aikins-1902-ch16-footnote-quotes-jevons-eight-syllogism-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-them

• 2026-10-11: This same book also contains, in Lesson XXIII ("Boole's System of Logic," pp.191–201, under the thematic heading "RECENT LOGICAL VIEWS"), Jevons's own description of the Logic Piano and a citation to its 1870 Royal Society debut — sixty to seventy pages past the Lesson X/XV material Aikins cites, under a heading Jevons himself calls "recent" rather than foundational. See claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-lesson-xxiii-describes-logic-piano-and-its-royal-society-debut and claim-aikins-engagement-with-jevons-tracks-traditional-syllogism-block-not-booles-system-block.