Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/23

LEONARDO DA VINCI 209 LEONARDO DA VINCI By Anna Jameson (1452-1519) L' eonardo da Vinci seems to present in his own person a rdsume' of all the characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was the miracle of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth ; patient and persevering as age ; a most profound and original thinker ; the greatest math- ematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time ; architect, chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter — we are not only astounded by the vari- ety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts which have been pub- lished from MSS. now existing in his own hand- writing show him to have anticipated by the force of his own intellect some of the greatest discover- ies made since his time. " These fragments," says Mr. Hallam, " are, according to our common es- timate of the age in which he lived, more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Castelli, and other names illustrious ; the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologists, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must be the guides to just theory in the investi- gation of nature. If any doubt could be harbored, not as to the right of Leo- nardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be by an hypothe- sis not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record." It seems at first sight almost incomprehensible that, thus endowed as a phi- losopher, mechanic, inventor, discoverer, the fame of Leonardo should now rest on the works he has left as a painter. We cannot, within these limits, attempt to explain why and how it is that as the man of science he has been naturally and necessarily left behind by the onward march of intellectual progress, while as the 14