Nor can a high degree of praise be denied to his financial policy, especially his plans for the reduction of the national debt and the simplification and consolidation of its different branches.
Series 6, Apocarpeae, is characterized by 5 carpels, and in the last series Glumaceae, great simplification in the flower is associated with a grass-like habit.
Thence, like so many of the Marian exiles, he proceeded to Frankfurt, where he endeavoured to compose the disputes between the "Coxians" (see Cox, Richard), who regarded the 1552 Prayer Book as the perfection of reform, and the Knoxians, who wanted further simplification.
In the numerous degenerate forms simplification occurs by obliteration of the demarcations of somites and the fusion of body-regions, together with a gradual suppression of the lamelliferous respiratory organs and the substitution for them of tracheae, which, in their turn, in the smaller and most reduced members of the group, may also disappear.
We may infer therefore that as early as 1594 Napier had communicated to some one, probably John Craig, his hope of being able to effect a simplification in the processes of arithmetic. Everything tends to show that the invention of logarithms 2 See Mark Napier's Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston (1834), p. 362.
