SOME REMARKS ON LOGARITHMS APROPOS TO THEIR 
TERCENTENARY-.! 
By M. p’Ocaenr, 
Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique. 
[With 2 plates.] 
The Royal Society of Edinburgh during the last week of July, 
1914, fittingly observed the tercentenary of the invention of loga-. 
rithms by John Napier, Baron of Merchiston, whose name, Latinized 
in the form of Neperus, has become in French Néper. In July, 
1614, Napier published at Edinburgh, under the title ‘‘Mirifici 
Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio,” a quarto work of 56 pages 
of text and 90 pages of tables, dedicated to the Prince of Wales (later 
the unfortunate King Charles I), which was to revolutionize the art 
of numerical calculation, and exercise a prodigious influence on the 
development of all collateral sciences, astronomy in particular. 
We can not on this occasion fail to recall that one of the first and 
most eager adepts at the new method of calculation was Kepler, 
who, by his own confession, would perhaps without this aid have 
given up the preparation of those tables from which with the intui- 
tion of a genius he was to evolve the marvelous laws of the plane- 
tary movements which bear his name, and which in their turn led 
Newton to what is undoubtedly the highest human achievement in 
therealm of natural philosophy—the principle of universal gravitation. 
It seems, besides, that Napier, an essentially mystic spirit, must 
have foreseen all the progress of which his invention was to be the 
source when he ended the book in which he made that invention 
known with these words, ‘‘Interim hoc brevi opusculo fruamini 
Deoque opifici summo omniumque bonorum opitulatori laudem sum- 
mam et gloriam tribuite’”’ (let those who reap the harvest of this 
small work pay a tribute of glory and thankfulness to God, sovereign 
author and dispenser of all good). 
Logarithms in our day are so familiar to all who have taken up 
mathematics in any way, even the mere elementary branches, that 
the extraordinary originality of the discovery which gave them 
birth is perhaps somewhat shadowed. 
On the other hand, those who are unfamiliar with the study of 
the exact sciences and know logarithms by name only, are apt to 
1 Reprinted by permission from La Nature, Paris, July 11, 1914, 
175 
