The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

record. Thus they tend to confirm Vasari in his more picturesque statements. He has told how Leonardo, when he passed the places where birds were sold, would often take them from their cages, pay the price demanded, and restore their liberty by letting them fly into the air. "The goldfinch," wrote Leonardo, "will carry spurge to its little ones imprisoned in a cage—death rather than loss of liberty." The meaning of the note becomes clear from the fact that certain varieties of the spurge form a violent poison. His account of how Leonardo collected lizards, hedgehogs, newts, serpents, and all sorts of strange creatures, and from these constructed the head of a hideous monster—when in his youth he received a commission to paint something on a shield which should cause terror to the beholder—is directly confirmed by the painter’s own instruction on "how to make an imaginary animal appear real." The method was that each part should have a basis in reality: for example, the body of a serpent, the head of a mastiff or setter, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a porcupine, the nose of a greyhound, the eyebrows of a lion, the temples of an old cock, and the neck of a turtle. So also with reference to Leonardo’s activities as master of pageants at the Court of Milan, the automatic lion which, according to Vasari, formed part of the pageant on the occasion of the entry of the French King—which advanced a few steps and opened its chest to show it filled with lilies—is drawn in different positions on a page of the Anatomy MSS. at Windsor.

The letters and fragments of letters are also of primary importance for the biographer. They express the whole range of emotions, from the proud confidence of the first letter to Ludovico and that to the Commissioners of the Cathedral of Piacenza, through the brief appeals of the later days in Milan when "the horse" was ready for casting and foreign subsidies had exhausted the Treasury, to those written in the depression of the Roman period, when his hopes of employment had been frustrated and he had been denounced to the Pope for his practice of anatomy, while his nerves were reacting helplessly to the misbehavior of an apprentice.

Of the real ultimate value of the results of Leonardo’s various scientific researches and investigations, I have no right to attempt to speak. They can be judged only by specialists, and whenever a section is reviewed in this way, the result from the time of Dr. William Hunter onwards has been to confirm the impression of their great worth, es-