THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN ENGLAND. 



269 



35. 



The Royal 



utation. 1 Edinburgh had also one of the earliest chairs 

 of chemistry. It grew into an independent centre of 

 original scientific work when in 1783 the Eoyal Society 

 of Edinburgh was incorporated. Ever since the founda- 

 tion of the Scotch universities, mathematics had been 

 studied independently in Scotland, where John Napier 

 of Merchiston had at the end of the sixteenth century 

 invented logarithms. " Whether we consider the great 

 originality of the idea, the difficulty of carrying it into 

 effect in the state in which algebraical analysis then was, 

 or the immense practical and theoretical value of the inven- 

 tion, we shall have little difficulty in claiming for Napier 

 the honour of a discovery unsurpassed in brilliancy in 

 the whole history of mathematics." 2 From that time the 



1 " In 1738 the foundation-stone 

 of that building which was till re- 

 cently the Royal Infirmary of Edin- 

 burgh was laid, and a great public 

 enthusiasm on the subject was mani- 

 fested. Drummond, the greatest 

 ^Edile that has ever governed the 

 city of Edinburgh, and Monro, were 

 appointed the Building Committee, 

 and they paid the workmen with 

 their own hands. All classes con- 

 tributed : landowners gave stone ; 

 merchant* gave timber ; farmers 

 lent their carts for carriage of 

 materials ; even the masons and 

 other labourers gave one day's work 

 out of the month gratis, as it was a 

 building for the benefit of the poor " 

 (Sir A. Grant, loc. cit., vol. L p. 

 306). 



2 Quoted by Sir A. Grant (loc. 

 cit., vol. ii. p. 293) from Chrystal's 

 unpublished Inaugural Address, 

 ' John Napier, Baron of Merchiston ' 

 (1550-1617). The 'Mirifici Logar- 

 ithmorum Canonis Descriptio ' ap- 

 peared in 1614. The ' Logarithmo- 

 rum Chilias prima ' of Henry Briggs 



(1556-1630), professor at Oxford, 

 contains the first table of com- 

 mon or decimal logarithms. 

 Kepler (1571-1630) received the 

 invention with great enthusiasm as 

 of immense importance to astro- 

 nomy. "The more one considers 

 the condition of science at the time, 

 and the state of the country in 

 which the discovery took place, 

 the more wonderful does the in- 

 vention of logarithms appear. . . . 

 It is one of the surprises in the 

 history of science that logarithms 

 were invented as an arithmetical 

 improvement years before their 

 connection with exponents was 

 known. It is to be noticed also 

 that the invention was not the re- 

 sult of any happy accident. Every- 

 thing tends to show that it was 

 the result of many years of labour 

 and thought undertaken with this 

 special object ; Napier succeeded in 

 devising, by the help of arithmetic 

 and geometry alone, the one great 

 simplification of which they were 

 susceptible a simplification to 



