Napier's wonderful invention was enthusiastically adopted throughout Europe. In astronomy, in particular, the time was overripe for such a discovery; as Laplace asserted, the invention of logarithms "by shortening the labors doubled the life of the astronomer." Bonaventura Cavalieri, about whom we shall have more to say in Chapter XI, did much to bring logarithms into vogue in Italy. A similar service was rendered by Johann Kepler in Germany and Edmund Wingate in France. Kepler will be considered more fully below in Section 9-6; Wingate, who spent many years in France, became the most prominent seventeenth-century British textbook writer on elementary arithmetic.