The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete


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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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