Scientific Intelligence. — History. 
201 
HISTORY. 
28. Burial Place of the Inventor of Logarithms. — The in- 
terest which we take in whatever relates to the illustrious dead, 
naturally excites a wish to know where the ashes of John Na- 
pier of Merchiston, the celebrated Inventor of Logarithms, were 
deposited. It is said, in the account given of his life and writ- 
ings by the Earl of Buchan and Dr Min to, that he was inter- 
red in the Cathedral Church of St Giles at Edinburgh, on 
the east side of its northern entrance, where there formerly 
was a stone tablet on the wall (on the outside of the Church), 
intimating that the burial place of the Napiers was in that 
place *. Probably this has been stated on the authority 
of Maitland, who, in his History of Edinburgh, says the 
same thing, and who may have supposed that the remains of 
this celebrated man must have been deposited in the family 
burial-place, although there be no visible memorial that this was 
actually the case. There is reason, however, to believe, that 
Maitland’s statement is wrong, and that Napier was not interred 
in the Church, or burying-ground of St Giles, but in the 
Church of St Cuthbert’s, or, as it is commonly called, the West 
Church ; for, in a Treatise on Trigonometry, from the pen of a 
Scotch Mathematician, James Hume of Godscroft, licensed in 
April 1635, and printed in the following year at Paris, we find 
the following curious passage : “ L’inuenteur (de Logarithmes) 
estoit vn Seigneur de grande condition, et duquel la posterite 
est auiourd’huy en possession de grandes dignitez dans le Roy- 
aurae, qui estant sur l’aage, et grandement trauaille des gouttes 
ne pouuoit faire autre chose que de s’adonner aux sciences, et 
principalement aux Mathematiques et a la Logistique, a quoy il 
se plaisoit infiniment, et auec estrange peine, a construict ses 
Tables des Logarymes imprimees a Edimbourg en fan 1614, 
qui tout aussitost donnerent vn estonnement a tous les Mathe- 
maticiens de fEurope, et emportere~t le sieur Bigges (Briggs) 
Professeur a Oxford, 4’Angleterre en Escosse, pour apprendre 
de luy cette admirably inuention, de construire vne nouuelle es- 
* This stone was removed when the row of houses, called the Luckenbooths, 
was taken down ; it is now within the Church. 
VOL. XIII. NO. 25 . JULY 1825 . 
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