44 H. S. CARSLAW. 
University of St. Andrews at the age of 13: but, even though 
his student days began thus early, his mind seems to have 
found its most congenial field of labour in searching out 
the mysteries of the Apocalypse. According to his own 
account, it was in his “‘tender years and barneage in Sanct- 
Androis at the Schooles,”’ and in connection with political — 
events, that he first turned his mind to this study. Thirty 
years later, in 1593, he published A Plaine Discovery of 
the whole Revelation of St. John; and, if he were not by 
that time well-known among the theologians of his day, 
this work must have established his fame. It had a large 
circulation, and was translated into Dutch, French, and 
German. To tell the truth, I have made no effort to make 
myself acquainted with its contents, even though in the 
Address to the Godly and Christian Reader he states that 
he was “‘constrained of compassion, leauing the Latine, 
to haste out in English this present worke, almost unripe, 
that hereby the simple of this Iland may be instructed...”’ 
It is not in praise of Napier, the theologian, but in honour 
of Napier, the discoverer of logarithms, that we are met. 
But if you recollect the period in which he published his 
views upon these mysteries, and the nature of the disputes 
in which the theologians of those days found keenest 
pleasure, you will not be surprised to learn that the Plaine 
Discovery was unlikely to have such free and unrestricted 
circulation as his later works in the countries over which 
the Pope and the King of Spain then had jurisdiction. 
Even at this period of his life Napier seems to have made 
some progress towards his great discovery, for we are told 
on the authority of Kepler, that about this time Tycho 
Brahe had heard from a Scottish correspondent that a 
canon, or table, of such aids to computation was in process 
of construction. Indeed mathematics had long shared with 
theology the studious hours of Napier. He had done some- 
thing towards extending the sciences of arithmetic and 
