Some Difficulties with Sunspots and Mr Macleod: Adding to the Bibliography of W.S. Jevons

This paper discusses and reprints two additions to the bibliography of published works by W. Stanley Jevons. The first, concerning Jevons’s sunspot theory of commercial fluctuations, is a signed letter, published by the Athenaeum in February 1879. The second item is a review of the first volume of Henry Dunning Macleod’s Economical Philosophy, published by the Manchester Guardian in June 1873. Unlike the sunspots letter, the review was unsigned. I suggest, however, that it can be attributed to Jevons with a high degree of probability and that it helps explain some puzzling aspects of Jevons’s comments regarding Macleod in his Theory of Political Economy