John Napier (1550-1617) lived most of his life at the imposing family estate of Merchiston Castle, near Edinburgh, Scotland, and expended much of his energies in the political and championed the causes of John Knox and James I. In 1593, he published a bitter and widely read attack on the Church of Rome entitled A Plaine Discouery of the whole Reuelation of Saint Iohn, in which he endeavored to prove that the Pope was Antichrist and that the Creator proposed to end the world in the years between 1688 and 1700. The book ran through 21 editions, at least ten of them during the author's lifetime, and Napier sincerely believed that his reputation with posterity would rest upon this book. He also wrote prophetically of various infernal war engines and of "devises of sayling under water," accompanying the writings with plans and diagrams. Some of his war chariots are remarkably like a modern tank, and one of them was to contain a great chopping mouth that would destroy anything in its path. It is no wonder that his remarkable ingenuity and imagination led some to believe he was mentally unbalanced and others to regard him as a dealer in the black art. Many stories, probably unfounded, ars told in support of these views. Thus there was the time he announced that his coal black rooster would identify for him which of his servants was stealing from him. The servants were sent one by one into a darkened room with instructions to pat the rooster on the back. Unknown to the servant, Napier had coated the bird's back with lampblack, and the guilty servant, fearing to touch the rooster, returned with clean hands.