"Our authority is the letter from Kepler to Napier, with which these Memoirs conclude, and which Montucla had never seen. So the "homo cunctator" calculated tables of Logarithms in 1609, and then cast them among the rubbish of his study; in the year 1617 a copy of Napier's Canon is laid, as the wonder of the day, before Kepler himself, the oracle of European science, in the city of Prague; from that moment Kepler's whole existence is identified with his love of Logarithms, and all that he ever says for his friend Byrgius is, that he did not make the discovery; in 1619 (two years after Napier's death,) the "homo cunctator" has his portrait engraved; in 1620 he is said to have printed at Prague some isolated and useless fragment of a table, but it is not even pretended that he put forth any claim; ten years afterwards, namely, in 1630, Bramer, brother-in-law to the "homo cunctator," has the effrontery to announce, and without so much as a detailed or explicit account in support of his allegation, that Justus Byrgius, and not John Napier, is the inventor of Logarithms."
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Jost Bürgi
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