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W illiam Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is best known as a British economist who was one of the pioneers of contemporary neoclassical economic analysis, with its subjective value theory rooted in marginal utility. His applied economics and theoretical insights marked new points of departure for later economists who would more fully shape the neoclassical tradition. But Jevons is also remembered as an early contributor to ecological economics and energetics as a result of his pioneering work The Coal Question (1865/1906), which raised fundamental issues regarding energy efficiency and the economy of fuel (Martinez-Alier, 1987). Jevons’s intellectual career bloomed for a mere 20 years due to a late start and an early death. Likewise, his development as an economist included various detours that contributed to his economic theories. The well-to-do Jevons family was disrupted by the death of Jevons’s mother in 1845 and the failure of his father’s iron merchant business in 1848 (Black, 1981, pp. 2-4). The economically vulnerable position of the family later contributed to Jevons’s decision to leave University College at London, where he was studying chemistry and mathematics, to accept a position as an assistant assayer to the Royal Mint in Sydney, Australia, in 1853. In Australia, Jevons explored the colony, studying nature and meteorology. But his interests in studying and defining the operations of the human world led him to forgo the lucrative position in 1859 so that he could return to London to study philosophy, logic, political economy, mathematics, classics, and history. By 1862, Jevons had completed his BA and MA and was in the process of creating the synthesis of logic, mathematics, and philosophy that underlined his economic thought. He viewed economics as a mathematical science, dealing with quantities of time, consumption, production, and investment (Black, 1987, p. 1009). Jevons’s laws of logic were so mechanically structured that he built a “logic machine,” which is recognized as a forerunner of modern computers, to perform processes of reasoning. Starting as a tutor at Owens College in Manchester in 1863, Jevons was promoted to Cobden professor of political economy and professor of logic, mental, and moral philosophy by 1865 on the merits of his contributions to these fields of science (Black, 1981, pp. 4-6). Jevons’s published works were on the laws of reason-