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De arte logistica ... libri qui supersunt [ed. by M. Napier].
De arte logistica libri qui supersunt - ed. by M. Napier Author:John Napier Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE FRANCIS LORD NAPIER OF MERCHISTON, Etc. Etc. Etc. My Dear Lord Napier, This Memorial of your great Ancestor, which it has bee... more »n my ambition to present in a form worthy of the genius it records, I dedicate to you, in remembrance of the exemplary liberality with which the Archives of your noble family have been always open to illustrate the History and the Letters of Scotland. Yours affectionately, MARK NAPIEH. Edinburgh, November 1, 1839- INTKODUCTION. chapter{Section 4INTRODUCTION. In the Memoirs of Napier of Merchiston, published in 1834, some account was given of two manuscript treatises—one of Arithmetic, and the other of Algebra—composed in Latin by that celebrated mathematician, and which had remained in- edited in the charter-chest of his family, and indeed unknown to the world, until the Memoirs were published. Upon that occasion, little more could be afforded than a very imperfect review of their contents. The idea subsequently occurred, that it might gratify the lovers of science if these mathematical studies of (to adopt the expressions of the historian Hume) " The celebrated Inventor of Logarithms, the person to whom the title of Great Man is more justly due than to any other whom his country ever produced,"—were added as an appendixto a new edition of his Life. I have been induced, however, to publish the treatises in their present independent and more becoming form, by the spirited interposition of the Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs of Scotland ; whose unanimous patronage of the work,—with their characteristic care for, and pride in, the ancient letters of Scotland,—has alone enabled me to render the volume so worthy a memorial of Scotish genius. Napier's scientific manuscripts came into the possession, not of his ...« less