NAPIER, John. Logorithmorum Canonis Descriptio, Seu Arithmeticarum Supputationum Mirabilis abbreviatio. [- Sequitur Tabula Canonis Logarithmorum; Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis construction; Annotationibus aliquot … Henrici Briggii].
Lyons: Bartholomaeus Vincentius, 1620.

Second (first obtainable) edition of his ‘Contructio’ (Horblit 77b, 1619), with the first Continental edition of the ‘Descriptio’ (Horblit 77a, 1614) – “The work which in the history of British science can be placed as second only to Newton’s Principia” (Evans 4).

“His ‘Description of the Wonderful Table of Logarithms’ is unique in the history of science in that a great discovery was the result of the unaided original speculation of one individual without precursors and almost without contemporaries in his field.” (PMM 116).

“Logarithms provided a most important advance in the art of calculation because they reduced multiplication and division to a process of addition and subtraction, and extraction of roots to division.” (Dibner 106).

“Napier’s invention of logarithms was immediately adopted by mathematicians both in England and on the continent, including Briggs and Ursinus, who introduced logarithms to Kepler.” (Norman). Kepler “expressed his enthusiasm in a letter to Napier dated 28 July 1619, printed in the dedication of his ‘Ephemerides’, 1620.” (DSB).

The ‘Descriptio’ “contains fifty-seven pages of text explaining the uses of logarithms in both plane and spherical trigonometry and ninety pages of tables. The method of producing the table was not described, but Napier indicated that should this work be suitably received, he would publish another (the Constructio) on how they were calculated. … He died before he could complete the task, but his son Robert Napier completed and published it in 1619. Napier’s 1614 publication is always referred to as the ‘Descriptio’, and the 1619 volume as the ‘Constructio’.” (Tomash).

“Napier also did work in spherical trigonometry and in his ‘Rabdologiae seu Numerationes per Virgulas libri II’, Edinburgh, 1617, announced another important invention, ‘Napier’s Bones’. These were rods which could be used to find the product of two numbers in a mechanical way, the quotient of one number divided by another, and square and cube roots. They were the precursors of seventeenth-century and modern calculating machines.” (PMM). “Mechanized addition and substraction were introduced in 1642 by Pascal, then 19 years old.” (Dibner 107).

This edition (the second of the ‘Constructio’ and first Continental edition of the ‘Descriptio’) was published together with a small appendix containing annotations by Henry Briggs on base-ten logarithms (see Norman 339).

Presumably most readers were concerned mainly by the applications of logarithms, their construction being of interest only to mathematicians and compilers of tables. While the Descriptio was reprinted many times, and translated into English as early as 1616, the Constructio had to wait until 1889 before an English translation was produced. The offered work is the first reprinting of the two works and is today the earliest accessible edition of the Constructio (the Macclesfield copy of the 1619 edition appears to be the only copy to have appeared at auction in the past 30 years). The last copy of the first edition of the Descriptio sold for $72,000 (Christie's 2007.)

In a very few copies of the Lyons edition the title page of the Descriptio carries the date 1619. MacDonald remarks: “On the issue of the Edinburgh edition of 1619, Barthold Vincent would appear to have set out at once about the preparation of an edition for issue at Lyon with the date 1619 on the title. ......A possible explanation of this may be that the title-page was originally set up with the date MDCIX, but when it was found that the whole work could not be issued in that year, the date was altered to MDCXX, and a few copies may have been printed before the alteration. The only copy we have found is in the Bibliotheque Nationale.”

This edition: Honeyman 2292; Erwin Tomash Library N5; Kenney 3071; Macdonald pp.141-43.

Three parts in one vol. (as issued), 4to (190 x 128 mm), pp. [viii], 56; [92: tables]; 62, title printed in red and black, mildly browned, some gatherings with a small worm whole trace in the upper right corner (not effecting text), in all a good copy in a fine contemporary vellum binding.