 The German mathematician Ernst Schröder played a key role in the tradition of the algebra of logic. A good example was his challenge to Peirce to provide a proof of the distributive law, as one of the key equational properties of the algebras with two binary operations. Peirce (1885) admitted that he could not provide a proof. Years later Huntington (1904: 300–301) described part of the content of a letter he had received from Peirce in December 1903 that claimed to provide the missing proof—evidently Peirce had stumbled across the long lost pages after the death of Schröder in 1902. Peirce explained to Huntington that he had originally assumed Schröder’s challenge was well-founded and that this apparent shortcoming of his paper “was to be added to the list of blunders, due to the grippe, with which that paper abounds, …”. Actually Peirce’s proof did not correct the error since the distributive law does not hold in lattices in general; instead his proof brought in the operation of complementation—he used the axiom