RECORDS 



OF 



GENERAL SCIENCE. 



Article I. 



Memoir of John JYapier, Baron of Merchiston. 

 By J. B. Biot* 



Montaigne, in his Chapter of Proper Names, has asked, To 

 •whom belongs the honour of so many victories — to Guesquin, 

 Glesquin, or Geaquin, since the name of this distinguished 

 person has assumed all these different forms ? If intellectual 

 conquests and military glory can admit of any analogy, and 

 we leave this to be decided, we might ask the same question 

 in reference to the subject of our Memoir, whose simple 

 mathematical invention has, as it were, lengthened a hundred 

 fold, the scientific lives of Kepler, Halley, Bradley, Mayer, 

 Lacaille, Piazzi, Delambre ; has extended that of Laplace, 

 and even that of Newton ; and continues, indefinitely, a 

 similar prodigy to those whose zeal, if not genius, is applied, 

 after these great men, to the mathematical study of natural 

 phenomena. For we are still ignorant whether the discovery 

 of Logarithms was due to Neper, Napeir, or Napier .+ Even 

 at the time when it was published in 1614, the author was 

 so little known beyond the limits of his own country, that 

 Kepler, who received and employed this invention with 



* Journal des Savants, March, 1835. (This constitutes a critique, by Biot, on 

 the Life of Lord Napier, from the pen of Mark Napier, Esq. We publish it for 

 the sake of " audi alteram partem " — Edit.) 



f In a letter to hifl father his signature is Neper ; at his dedication of the Kxpla- 

 nation of the Apocalypse to King James VI. h is Napeir ; at bis will it is Nuipper. 

 Ii is commonly spelled Napier, 



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