vi INQUIRY AND INTERPRETATION 129 



ment and the observation of Nature, he stood out as 

 the champion of unfettered inquiry in a period of 

 scientific stagnation, and he suffered persecution, banish- 

 ment and imprisonment for his temerity. In popular 

 esteem the memory of this champion of experimental 

 science and advocate of positive knowledge has always 

 been cherished ; and after seven hundred years, in 1914, 

 Oxford commemorated the birth of this one of her great- 

 est sons described by Humboldt as " the greatest ap- 

 parition of the Middle Ages," by erecting a statue to him. 

 Two hundred years after Roger Bacon, appeared that 

 prodigy of Nature, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), 

 whose curiosity was insatiable, and whose methods were 

 to search out all things, to experiment and verify, to 

 let his eyes test and his reason judge. Another Italian 

 philosopher who saw that the appeal should be from 

 authority to Nature and urged that all true knowledge 

 came from data given by the senses, was Bernardino 

 Telesio (1509-1588). Leonardo himself had the clearest 

 ideas as to the scientific method of inquiry. 



In treating any particular subject I would first of all make 

 some experiments, because my design is first to refer to experi- 

 ments and then to demonstrate why bodies are constrained to 

 act in such a manner. This is the method we ought to follow 

 in investigating the phenomena of Nature. Theory is the general, 

 experiments are the soldiers. Experiment is the interpreter of 

 the artifices of Nature. It is never wrong ; but our judgment 

 is sometimes deceived because we are expecting results which 

 experiment refuses to give. We must consult experiment and 

 vary the circumstances, till we have deduced general laws, for 

 it alone can furnish us with them. Leonardo da Vinci. 



Leonardo was by profession an engineer, but he 

 was also sculptor, musician and poet, and his fresco 

 representing the Last Supper places him among the 

 most illustrious artists of the world. He investigated 



G.D. I 



