THE CURVES OF LIFE: A CRITICISM 1 



By H. G. PLIMMER, F.R.S. 



He who will build a new house has undertaken a hard task. 

 He has to fetch the bricks and the planks from afar, and when 

 the house is built a crack may appear in the walls, an arch may 

 sink, so that it may be years before it is fit to live in and to be 

 a joy to himself and to others. Mr. Cook has here attempted to 

 build in the kingdom of thought a temple to Proportion (under 

 various guises), and he has had to collect his bricks, his planks, 

 his materials from every part of that kingdom, from zoologists, 

 artists, architects, mathematicians, botanists and anthropologists. 

 It has been a difficult task, but it has been extremely well done. 

 The linking together of life and art by a common factor is as 

 important as it is interesting, and this common factor, which is 

 a new mathematical conception of far-reaching applicability, is a 

 key opening unexpected relationships to many natural and 

 artistic phenomena which are set forth in Mr. Cook's book. 



This book, which contains the results of twenty years of 

 observation and research, deals with a subject that has been for 

 centuries in the minds of those men of science and of those 

 artists who were capably appreciative of each other's field of 

 work. It deals with the question of Proportion, in the largest 

 sense ; of the relations of growth and form, of function and form, 

 of the relations of form to the various arts, and it gives us a 

 mathematical constant which can be applied to these various 

 cases ; which constant is a quite new solution of a very old 

 difficulty, and it would seem to be of almost universal applica- 

 bility. Besides this, the book contains many interesting episodical 

 pages on the work and " life-laboured utterance of passionate 

 thought " of Leonardo da Vinci, whose spirit, in quotations and 

 drawings, hangs over the whole content, and inspires it. 



' The Curves of Life, being an account of spiral formations and their application 

 to growth in Nature, to Science, and to Art, with special reference to the manuscripts 

 of Leonardo da Vinci. By Theodore Andrea Cook, M.A., F.S.A. Pp. xxx + 478, 

 with 11 plates and 415 illustrations. (Constable & Co., Ltd., 1914. Price 12s. 6d. 

 net.) 



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