Elementary arithmetic, with brief notices of its history... by Robert Potts.

LOGARITHMS.

IN the lives of scientific men there is commonly little of interest
besides their discoveries and improvements in science, and their
writings and correspondence with the learned of their own times. The
inventor of logarithms, however, was eminent in other respects than as
a man of science. His patriotic conduct and decided Christian character,
exhibited on difficult occasions, are not unworthy of some brief notices
in connection with his important inventions in the mathematical
sciences. John Napier, son of Sir Archibald Napier, of Merchiston,
master of the mint in Scotland, was born in the year 1550. His
mother's brother was the first reformed bishop of Orkney, and the
wise advice respecting the early education of his nephew appears not
to have been tendered in vain.
In the fourteenth year of his age, young Napier was incorporated a
member of St. Salvator's College in St. Andrew's University, which
only a few years before had been almost deserted in consequence of
the tumults raised against the Reformation. About that time, 1563,
it appears that the students of St. Andrew's were exercised once a
week in theological disputations, at which one of the masters presided.
The students were exhorted to avoid the altercations usually practised
in the schools, and to behave themselves as men desirous of mutual
instruction, and as the servants of Christ, who ought not to strive, but
to be gentle to all. Young Napier had before studied the sacred
Scriptures, and aspiring to become a decided Protestant, he applied
his energies to the sacred cause of truth.
This fact is derived from his own words in the address " To the
'Godly and Christian Reader," prefixed to his "Plain Discovery of the
Revelation of St. John," published in English in 1593.1 He writes:
"In my tender yeares and barneage in Sanct-Androis, at the schooles,
having, on the one part, contracted a loving familiaritie with a certaine
gentleman, &c., a Papist; and, on the other part, being attentive to the
sermons of that worthie man of God, Maister Christopher Goodman,
teaching upon the Apocalyps, I was so mooved in admiration against
the blindnes of Papists, that could not most evidently see their sevenhilled citie, Rome, painted out there so lively by Saint John as the
mother of all spirituall whoredome, that not onely bursted I out in continual reasoning against my said familiar, but also from thenceforth I
-determined with myselfe (by the assistance of God's Spirit) to employ
my studie and diligence to search out the remanent mysteries of that
1 His work on the Apocalypse contains much that is sound, and much that is
plausible; but, like all who have ventured to open the seals of unfulfilled prophecy,
lie has failed to convince any rational man that he has been admitted to the secrets
of the kingdom of heaven. His study of the prophetic visions of St. John appears
to have led him to assume the prophetic character (always a dangerous assumption),
and to predict that the day of judgment was to happen between the years 1688 and
1700 (Book I., Prop. 14). It is, perhaps, almost needless to remark that the progress of time has proved that Napier, as well as a later Scotch prophet, the Rev.
Edward Irving, had both made a mistake in converting their conjectures into
prophetic announcements.