The Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. 6

Folio 7 (verso)

Why warm hands
feel fresh water colder
than cold hands will.
+Because fresh water is further
from the nature of heat than from cold.

A way to understand
the alchemy of nature Leonardo uses "alchemy" here to mean the natural process of transformation and mixing of elements, rather than the occult practice of making gold. regarding the
mixture of water with
earth, which can be done in
+order to see this exhalation The process of vapors or "spirits" rising from the earth.
exemplified by the smoke
that comes out of the earth through the air.

Knowledge

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Folio 8 (recto)

On the nature of smoke:
After the rain-bearing air
gathers, the fog which goes up; and
because this fog is a mixture of
smoke and vapors, and this fog
goes upward and

+Smokes are born which are generated
by the humidity of the earth mixed
with cold; one [kind of] smoke becomes thin
and thickens, becoming fog
or rain.

And of the air mixed with
smoke: the smokes move
not by themselves, but by
the air mixed into that smoke,
moved by the speed
of the air.

Knowledge

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Folio 8 (verso)

+On the mixture of earth in water:
how fish cannot
remain in water stirred with mud.

+[This] arises from the mixture of air
that infuses itself in places where the water—
due to the percussion of winds or of the water
itself falling—infuses
air into itself; and because of its lightness,
this fog cannot be submerged,
due to its thinness and the humidity
that is infused through the air mixed with
earth, which is found mixed
in many places by reason of smoke;
and it is a nature of the air.

Knowledge

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Folio 9 (recto)

On the nature of the
mixture of dust in the air,
and in what way this dust
moves in the air by reason of
smoke.

It cannot move by itself
but by the air mixed in that dust,
and by its speed, moved by
the air, which moves in different
ways, either by wind or by heat or by
cold; and this is seen in the dust motes original: "pulvischolo."
that are seen in the air by the light of the sun
when it enters a dark place through
a crack in a window; this
dust moves because of the air moved
by heat or cold, or by the movements
of people.

Knowledge