1 66 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



But the tables of Napierian logarithms had hardly seen the 

 light before proposals were put forward for altering the base to 

 the more convenient number 10 also making zero the logarithm 

 of unity and unity the logarithm of 10, so that numbers and 

 their logarithms should increase and decrease together. In 

 giving an account of this change, Hutton, always learned and 

 usually extremely accurate, does less than justice to Napier, as 

 he assumes that Napier's part in recommending this important 

 alteration was practically nil and that jealousy of Napier's work 

 existed on the part of Briggs, which certainly seems to have no 

 foundation in fact. Mark Napier, in his Memoirs of John 

 Napier, successfully refutes Hutton's conclusions but " falls 

 into the opposite error of reducing Briggs to the level of a mere 

 computer." 



Without going exhaustively into the evidence, it would seem 

 sufficient to say that, taking the words of both Napier and 

 Briggs at their face value, the change by which o became the 

 logarithm of radius and the logarithm of the tenth part of radius 

 became 10,000,000,000 was the separate and independent idea of 

 each writer ; and that Napier further suggested that o should 

 become the logarithm of unity and 10,000,000,000 that of the 

 whole sine. 



Brigg's account of the matter is given in the preface to his 

 Arithmetica Logarithmic a (1624) : 



"... I myself, when expounding publicly in London their 

 doctrine to my auditors in Gresham College, remarked that it 

 would be much more convenient that o should stand for the 

 logarithm of the whole sine, as in the canon Mirificus, but that 

 the logarithm of the tenth part of the whole sine, that is to say, 

 5 degrees 24 minutes and 21 seconds, should be 10,000,000,000. 

 Concerning that matter I wrote immediately to the author 

 himself; and, as soon as the season of the year and my vacation 

 time of my public duties of instruction permitted, I took journey 

 to Edinburgh, where, being most hospitably received by him, 

 I lingered for a whole month. But as we held discourse 

 concerning this change in the system of logarithms, he said that 

 for a long time he had been sensible of the same thing and had 

 been anxious to accomplish it, 1 but that he had published those 

 he had already prepared, until he could construct tables more 

 convenient, if other weighty matters and his frail health would 

 permit him to do so. But he conceived that the change ought 



1 " Cum autem inter nos de horum mutatione sermo haberetur, ille se idem 

 dudum sensisse et cupivisse dicebat." 



