Intended for all readers--including magicians, detectives, musicians, orthopedic surgeons, and anthropologists--this book offers a thorough account of that most intriguing and most human of appendages: the hand. In this illustrated work, John Napier explores a wide range of absorbing subjects such as fingerprints, handedness, gestures, fossil remains, and the making and using of tools.

In Rajasthan, India, a caste of musicians and mendicants, the Nath-Jog?s, sing stories of kings who renounce their thrones to become wandering mendicants. They also sing of a god, Mahadeva, Shiva, who must abandon his world--renouncing life and reluctantly marry. In so doing, he establishes the very caste that tells his story. This book represents the first detailed ethnomusicological study of the music of this caste, examining how the existential questions of the sung stories--of the conflict between loyalty to families or communities and the transcending desire to renounce the material...

John Napier published his treatise on the discovery of logarithms in 1614. It was written in Latin, the scholarly language of his day, under the title Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. The importance of the work was quickly perceived and an English language translation by Edward Wright followed two years later, with the title A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithmes. A further English edition followed in 1618. It is said that this book freed the world from a logjam of calculations. John Napier spent more than twenty years working alone on his system of logarithms, during a...