NAPIER COMMEMORATIVE LECTURE. 43. 
of mathematics, and to all sciences in which complicated 
numerical calculations form a part, it would be impossible to 
over-estimate. In Australia of all countries it is peculiarly 
fitting that this service should be remembered, for there 
is not a ship which has crossed the 12,000 miles of ocean, 
separating us from the homeland, that does not owe 
the happy conclusion of its voyage, at least in part, to 
the genius and labour of the man whose work we honour 
this night. 
First of all, what manner of man was John Napier of 
Merchiston. He was the eldest son of Archibald Napier 
and Janet Bothwell, and was born in 1550 at the seat of 
his father, the Castle of Merchiston near Hdinburgh. On 
his father’s death, he succeeded him as Laird, or, in the 
language of the time, Baron, of Merchiston,* and his son 
Archibald was raised to the peerage, by the title of Lord 
Napier in 1627, ten years after John Napier’s life had ended. 
In the annals of our country the house of Napier and Ettrick 
has a distinguished place. 
Of his own life, however, few details are known. Born 
nearly a century before Newton, to quote the somewhat 
ambiguous words of his descendant and biographer Mark 
Napier, “‘in the most savage age of a barbarous land,’’ the 
antiquary finds little that will help him to reconstruct the 
daily lifeof Napier. A large number of his papers perished 
in a fire which broke out in the house of one of his descen- 
dants; and, so far as the facts of the life go, the biography 
by Mark Napier, published in 1834, from which we have just. 
quoted, is largely conjecture. He matriculated at the 
* John Napier is often spoken of as Lord Napier, but this is a mistake. 
He was not a nobleman, but only what would in England be called a lord 
of the manor. Such persons were formerly designated barones minores or 
lesser barons. In the title page of the Descriptio Napier calls himself 
Ioannes Neper, Baron Merchistonii, and in Wright’s English translation, 
approved by the author, John Nepair, Baron of Merchiston. 
