423 
of Edinburgh , Session 1874 - 75 . 
Table for which this Yol. 0, though then incomplete, had served 
as the foundation. This note I recite in full : — 
Note from u Nature f 8th October 1874. 
“ The President and Council of the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh, 
impressed with the conviction that the progress of the sciences 
demands, and has long demanded, fuller and more exact tables of 
logarithms than any which at present exist, have memorialised Sir 
Stafford Northcote with the view of inducing the G-overnment to 
print a nine-figure table of logarithms from unity to a million, part 
of which has already been calculated by Mr Sang, who has carried 
a fifteen-figure table up to 300,000. The subject of undertaking 
the publication of logarithm tables — so long as the number of 
figures does not exceed ten, the limit of utility — is one well worthy 
the attention of the G-overnment; but in the present case there are 
several reasons why, if the application is refused, the loss to science 
will not be so great as some might think. In the first place, a table 
of 1800 large pages, whether in one, two, or three volumes, will be 
so unwieldy that, notwithstanding the ease of the interpolations, it 
would probably be very seldom used by computers ; and secondly, 
because all who require more than seven figures will, no doubt, 
prefer to use ten, and consult the existing works. In fact, nearly 
all computors would, we believe, employ Vlacq or Yega in prefer- 
ence to the proposed table. Mr Sang, in the pamphlet which 
accompanies the memorial, makes a remarkable error when he 
intimates that the great French tables have not been used to verify 
any seven-figure table, so that, ‘up to the present moment we have 
no verification of Ylacq’s great work.’ In point of fact, the whole 
of Vlacq was read with the copy of the French tables, at the Paris 
Observatory, by M. Lefort, and the results are published in Yol. 
IV. of the ‘ Annales de l’Observatoire de Paris.’ Almost all the 
errors found by Mr Sang, by means of this table are among those 
there given by Lefort, and any one who choses ean, without much 
expenditure of trouble, render his copy of Ylacq all but free from 
error — much more accurate than any new table could possibly be.” 
In my paper on last-place errors in Ylacq, read here on the 20th 
April, I say, speaking of the Tables du Cadastre , “I have not 
learned that these computations have been used for the verification 
3 i 
VOL. VIII. 
