---
title: "Elementary Lessons in Logic (Jevons, 1870)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Elementary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive"
aliases: ["Elementary Lessons in Logic"]
first_seen: "2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["William Stanley Jevons","syllogism rules","conversion of propositions","Herbert Austin Aikins's Principles of Logic (1902)","19th-century logic textbooks"]
seek_code_commit: "c7427a5"
---


A widely reprinted Victorian logic primer by [[entity-william-stanley-jevons|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 [[entity-herbert-austin-aikins|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]].