First edition of a positivist collection of biographies drawn from Comte’s thirteen-month calendar of eminent men in history. This is not one for feminists; though in leap-years, an additional day is generously provided for ‘good women’ (and another for ‘all the dead’). Harrison was tutored by Congreve (see above) at Wadham and became a positivist under his instruction, though he later split from Congreve over the religious question, to found with a number of others a new positivist temple, Newton Hall, in 1881. The positivist calendar sets out a much clearer ‘Newtonian’, i.e. scientific, focus for human evolution: the first month is ‘Moses’ and represents ‘theocratic civilization’; the thirteenth month is named for Bichat the pathologist, and represents ‘modern science’. Biology, says Harrison, is of greater relevance to the positivist project than mathematics or astrology because it emphasizes the understanding of human beings. Created by Comte in the 1840s, this new scientific month contains no-one quite so modern for an audience of the 1890s as, for example, Darwin; the majority of the scientists in the calendar died in the early nineteenth century.