Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston. 267 



circumstances equally efficacious towards the upholding of their 

 doctrines. 



Then was the heyday of sorcerers and witches. They were 

 believed in, and they were burnt. Napier, as his biographer 

 confesses, passed with the vulgar as having his own share of 

 familiar conversation with " le vieux nick ;" and, indeed, he 

 appears to have been very willing to let the belief go that this 

 opinion was not without foundation. Yet in such estimation 

 was he held that he was never persecuted on that account. He 

 appears to have been in reality occupied with mechanical, and 

 even physical science ; for when the English had some reason to 

 dread the Popish fleets in 1596, Napier transmitted to the Scotch 

 ambassador at London a list of inventions, after the manner of 

 Archimedes, to annihilate them. These secrets are, of burning 

 mirrors, of pieces of artillery of a new construction, and a method 

 of navigating under water ; but all this is merely announced, not 

 given in detail. Unhappily he was not always so disinterested 

 in the application of his science, as appears from the following 

 contract in which he engaged with one of the most wicked 

 characters of that epoch, called Robert Logan of Restalrig ; a 

 contract the whole of which is in the handwriting of Napier 

 himself, and his biographer has been at the pains to furnish a 

 fac simile. This Logan of Restalrig had plunged with daring 

 ferocity into the desperate cabal of Francis Stuart, Earl of Both- 

 well, in 1594, and by virtue of that declaration of war went 

 robbing and hectoring on the high-roads in the neighbourhood of 

 Edinburgh. The legality of these proceedings not having, unfor- 

 tunately for him, been recognised, he had been cited before the 

 criminal court, and was outlawed for not appearing. But he 

 troubled himself very little about that matter, as he happened to 

 possess, on the wildest shores of the German ocean, an inacces- 

 sible retreat in the tower of Fal&-castle, celebrated of late years 

 under the name of Wolfs-crag, by Sir Walter Scott, in the Bride 

 of Lammermoor. There, Restalrig, not very well knowing what 

 to do with himself, called to mind an old tradition, according to 

 which some treasures had been, once upon a time, buried within 

 his castle ; and being cognizant of Napier as a very learned man, 

 somewhat addicted to necromancy, he made proposals to him 

 that he, Napier, should undertake the search, which the other 



