130 CATALOGUE.
1012 x 814 inches. They have not a blank leaf at the beginning, but have on the recto of a leaf after the title-page an extract from the minutes authorising the printing, followed by two leaves containing a list of the members of the Club; the Bannatyne Club having one hundred members and the Maitland Club ninety. The foregoing differences make the preliminary leaves six instead of four as in the collation.
The manuscript from which the work was published appears, from the following passage in the Memoirs (pp. 419, 420), to be the only one of Napier’s papers which survives.
Napier left a mass of papers, including his mathematical treatises and notes, all of which came into the possession of Robert as his father’s literary executor. When the house of Napier of Culcreugh was burnt, these papers perished, with only two exceptions that I have been able to discover. The one is the manuscript treatise on Alchemy by Robert Napier himself; but the other is a far more valuable manuscript, being entitled, “The Baron of Merchiston, his booke of Arithmeticke, and Algebra; for Mr Henrie Briggs, Professor of Geometrie at Oxforde.”....... it is of great length, beautifully written in the hand of his son, who mentions the fact, that it is copied from such of his father’s notes as the transcriber considered “orderlie sett doun.”
The treatise on Alchemy is elsewhere stated (pp. 236, 237) to be contained in a thin quarto volume closely written in the autograph of Robert Napier, bearing the title “Mysterii aurei velleris Revelatio; seu analysis philosophica qua nucleus veræ intentionis hermeticæ posteris Deum timentibus mantifestatur. Authore R. N.” and the motto—
“Orbis quicquid opum, vel habet medicina salutis,
Omne Leo Geminis suppeditare potest.”
In this connection the following entry may be mentioned which occurs in the sale catalogue of the first portion of the library of the late David Laing:—“Lambye (J. B.) Revelation of the secret Spirit (Alchymie) translated by R. N. E. (Robert Napier Edinburgensis ?) 1623.” The work sold for £7, 2s. 6d.
Libraries. Adv. Ed.; etc.
