"The Catenary has its name from Catena, a chain; being the curve which a regular and very flexible chain will assume, if suspended loosely from both ends. It seems to have been first noticed by the famous Galileo, who proposed it as the figure of an arch of equilibration, but unfortunately mistook it for a . In fact, the Catenary, near its vertex, differs insensibly from that curve, but afterwards deviates more considerably. ...the Parabola diverges faster from its axis than the Catenary. The error of Galileo in confounding those two curves was not perceived till , in 1669, ascertained, by actual experiment, that the Catenary is neither a Parabola nor an . It was in 1691, that the penetrating genius of James Bernoulli discovered the true nature of the catenarian curve. A similar investigation was soon produced by John Bernoulli, by Huygens, and by Leibnitz. This latter philosopher, whose powers of invention and stores of learning were alike transcendant, discovered the fine relation of the Catenary to the Logarithmic Curve."