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interest which has been attached to the change of ownership of
merely a few pages of Manuscript.
That, notwithstanding this eagerness to possess the Manuscripts,
their contents remained a mystery, can only be accounted for by the
many and great difficulties attending the task of deciphering them.
The handwriting is so peculiar that it requires considerable
practice to read even a few detached phrases, much more to solve
with any certainty the numerous difficulties of alternative
readings, and to master the sense as a connected whole. Vasari
observes with reference to Leonardos writing: "he wrote backwards,
in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that any one who is
not practised in reading them, cannot understand them". The aid of a
mirror in reading reversed handwriting appears to me available only
for a first experimental reading. Speaking from my own experience,
the persistent use of it is too fatiguing and inconvenient to be
practically advisable, considering the enormous mass of Manuscripts
to be deciphered. And as, after all, Leonardo's handwriting runs
backwards just as all Oriental character runs backwards--that is
to say from right to left--the difficulty of reading direct from the
writing is not insuperable. This obvious peculiarity in the writing
is not, however, by any means the only obstacle in the way of
mastering the text. Leonardo made use of an orthography peculiar to
himself; he had a fashion of amalgamating several short words into
one long one, or, again, he would quite arbitrarily divide a long
word into two separate halves; added to this there is no punctuation
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