My object has been to produce a work which should be as thoroughly
representative of the present state of the logic of the Oxford Schools
as any of the text-books of the past. The qualities which I have aimed
at before all others have been clearness and consistency. For the task
which I have taken upon myself I may claim one qualification--that of
experience; since more than seventeen years have now elapsed since I
took my first pupil in logic for the Honour School of Moderations, and
during that time I have been pretty continuously engaged in studying
and teaching the subject.

In acknowledging my obligations to previous writers I must begin with
Archbishop Whately, whose writings first gave me an interest in the
subject. The works of Mill and Hamilton have of course been freely
drawn upon. I have not followed either of those two great writers
exclusively, but have endeavoured to assimilate what seemed best in
both. To Professor Fowler I am under a special debt. I had not the
privilege of personal teaching from him in logic,--as I had in some
other subjects; but his book fell into my hands at an early period in
my mental training, and was so thoroughly studied as to have become a
permanent part of the furniture of my mind. Much the same may be said
of my relation to the late Professor Jevons's Elementary Lessons in
Logic. Two other books, which I feel bound to mention with special
emphasis, are Hansel's edition of Aldrich and McCosh's Laws of
Discursive Thought. If there be added to the foregoing Watts's Logic,
Thomson's Outlines of the Laws of Thought, Bain's Deductive Logic,
Jevons's Studies in Deductive Logic and Principles of Science,
Bradley's Principles of Logic, Abbott's Elements of Logic, Walker's
edition of Murray, Ray's Text-book of Deductive Logic, and
Weatherley's Rudiments of Logic, I think the list will be exhausted of
modern works from which I am conscious of having borrowed. But, not to