  In his youth Peirce was amazingly precocious, and he began to study logic seriously at an extraordinarily early age. According to noted Peirce scholar Max Fisch in his“Introduction” to Volume 1 of The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, p. xviii, Peirce’s introduction to and first immersion in the study of logic came in 1851 within a week or two of his turning 12 years of age. Remembering the occasion in 1910, in his “Note on the Doctrine of Chances,” in Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Volume II, Section 408 (hereinafter such Collected Papers references will be cited as CP, 2.408), Peirce himself remembered the crucial event as having occurred in 1852, when he was 13 years old. Regardless of his exact age, at the time of the event Charles encountered and then over a period of at most a few days studied and absorbed a standard textbook of the time on logic by Bishop Richard Whately. Having become fascinated by logic, he began to think of all issues as problems in logic. During his freshman year at college (Harvard), in 1855, when he was 16 years old, he and a friend began private study of philosophy in general, starting with Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and continuing with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Schiller’s distinction among the three basic human drives of Stofftrieb, Formtrieb, and Spieltrieb Peirce never forgot or renounced, and it became the basis for Peirce’s distinction between the man of practical affairs, the man of scientific activity, and the man of aesthetic practice. By Kant Peirce was initially more or less repelled. After three years of intense study of Kant, Peirce concluded that Kant’s system was vitiated by what he called its “puerile logic,” and about the age of 19 he formed the fixed intention of devoting his life to the study of and to research in logic. It was, however, impossible at that time, as indeed Peirce’s father Benjamin informed him, to earn a living as a research logician; and Peirce described himself at the time of his graduation from Harvard in 1859, just short of his 20th birthday, as wondering “what I would do in life.” Within two years, however, he had more or less resolved his problem.  During those two years he had worked as an Aid on the Coast Survey, in Maine and Louisiana, then had returned to Cambridge and had studied natural history and natural philosophy at Harvard. He said of himself that in 1861 he “No longer wondered what I would do in life but defined my object.” It is evident that his adoption of the profession of chemistry and his practice of geodesy allowed Charles both to support himself (and before long also his first wife Zina) and to continue to engage in researches on logic. From the early 1860s until his death in 1914 his output in logic was voluminous and varied.  One of his logical systems became the basis for Ernst Schroeder’s great three-volume treatise on logic, the Vorlesungen ueber die Algebra der Logik.