270 M. Biot's Abstract of Mr Napier s 



mercenary would be to apply the fallacious test of modern 

 notions to the dimly seen manners of antiquity." Papists, then, 

 are not the only persons who hold accommodating opinions ! 



Here terminates all that we have to say of Napier in a poh- 

 tical, moral, and theological point of view. We have explained 

 above the considerations which have led us to study him, in the 

 first instance, under that aspect, following the numerous mate- 

 rials presented to us by his recent biographer. It remains for 

 us now to contemplate him as a mathematician, and, thank God, 

 our task will be henceforth much easier. For to restore him 

 as such, the only view of him, in our conception, that merits 

 the regard of posterity, we have only to abstract, so to speak, his 

 own original works, completed, as they are, by several new and 

 curious documents that have been added by his present historian, 

 in which respect it may be said, with justice, that this biography 

 will prove to be of great utility. 



Second Article. — Hitherto, we have only discovered in 

 Napier a Scottish Baron of the sixteenth century. Confined to 

 the heart of a savage country, immured within a fortress tower, 

 he lived isolated with his family, without any interchange of 

 thought beyond what the management of his domains, or his 

 unavoidable participation in the political and religious quarrels 

 of his times, exacted. A Presbyterian, rigid and enthusiastic, 

 he commented on the Sacred Writings, after the manner of his 

 day; and under the influence of the same prejudices which 

 inflamed other fanatics of his sect, he expounded, with a reliance 

 not less wrapt, not less darkling, the pretended allusions of the 

 Divine word to those circumstances in which the reformed 

 church then found herself placed. 



Well ! from the very bosom of such darkness there was 

 destined to spring forth an invention — for I may not call it a dis- 

 covery — an invention almost mechanical and material, which was 

 to create a revolution in all the methods of arithmetical calculation 

 hitherto employed in the sciences, to bestow upon them a facility, 

 a simplicity, an accuracy, beyond all expectation ; even to the 

 extent of suddenly stultifying and annihilating a multitude of 

 numerical tables, previously calculated with inconceivable labour 

 and pains to facilitate mathematical results — toil, to which not 



