appear to us to be in utter confusion; on one and the same page,
observations on the most dissimilar subjects follow each other
without any connection. A page, for instance, will begin with some
principles of astronomy, or the motion of the earth; then come the
laws of sound, and finally some precepts as to colour. Another page
will begin with his investigations on the structure of the
intestines, and end with philosophical remarks as to the relations
of poetry to painting; and so forth.

Leonardo himself lamented this confusion, and for that reason I do
not think that the publication of the texts in the order in which
they occur in the originals would at all fulfil his intentions. No
reader could find his way through such a labyrinth; Leonardo himself
could not have done it.

Added to this, more than half of the five thousand manuscript pages
which now remain to us, are written on loose leaves, and at present
arranged in a manner which has no justification beyond the fancy of
the collector who first brought them together to make volumes of
more or less extent. Nay, even in the volumes, the pages of which
were numbered by Leonardo himself, their order, so far as the
connection of the texts was concerned, was obviously a matter of
indifference to him. The only point he seems to have kept in view,
when first writing down his notes, was that each observation should
be complete to the end on the page on which it was begun. The
exceptions to this rule are extremely few, and it is certainly
noteworthy that we find in such cases, in bound volumes with his
numbered pages, the written observations: "turn over", "This is the
continuation of the previous page", and the like. Is not this
sufficient to prove that it was only in quite exceptional cases that