"Justus Byrgius is the solitary mathematician for whom any thing like an independent claim to the invention has been set up betwixt the time of Archimedes and Napier. Not that it has ever been said that our philosopher borrowed any thing from the German; for the priority of Napier's publication, and the surpassing beauty of his algebraic method, has never met with contradiction. But there is a story that Kepler's friend had actually computed tables of Logarithms years before Napier published his canon, and, consequently, that the German stands nearly in the same relation to this great discovery that Newton himself does to the infinitesmal calculus, in the celebrated competition with Leibnitz. It would, indeed, be singular, if this public astronomer had computed such tables without giving them to the world, or ever himself pretending to the discovery."