Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS November 25 2011 from Julian Bell's review of "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan" show at the National Gallery: Perhaps variety is what this exhibition, this collection of the outstanding remains of a one-man civilization, is best fitted to offer. If you seek the coherence to all these phenomena you might need to turn to the scientific vision behind them, as Martin Kemp did in his illuminating book Leonardo da Vinci: The marvellous works of nature and man (1981). There you are led to consider the concept of the movements of the mind as a special case of a comprehensive investigation into movement. Whether through cogs and pulleys or through their fleshly equivalents (a parallel sometimes made explicit in the show's anatomical drawings), whether through patterns of plant growth and rock formation or through the workings of water and light, all that appears before our eyes must be governed by movement, a universal process organized around harmon...

from Richard A. Fortey's review of Pascal Richet's A Natural History of Time , translated by John Venerella: . . . in 1896 the physicist Gustave Le Bon actually announced to the Academy of Science in Paris the discovery of black light. * Leonardo da Vinci had recorded in his notebooks observations of the time needed to form sediments and raise fossils above the present sea level that were, as always, astonishing prescient. . . * Halley worked out how long it would take for the oceans to attain their saltiness from the input of salt from rivers, but he was--wisely, perhaps, given the implications--vague about his inferred long timescale. . . . * Georges-Louis Leclerc, later Comte de Buffon, performed a series of experiments by heating up and then cooling steel balls of various sizes. He then scaled up the results to account for the conditions remaining on earth today, assuming a molten origin for the planet--and came up with an age for the earth of slightly less than 200, 000 ye...