6 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



botanical, medical, or even artistic curiosity ; it might spring 

 from emotional feeling, or from a zest for climbing. It did not 

 necessarily involve any love of mountain scenery, but it prepared 

 the way for the growth of that sentiment. Juxtaposition revealed 

 or created affinity. It would be easy to multiply instances of these 

 exceptions to the temper of their age. But space forbids ; more- 

 over, the roll of early contributors to Alpine literature has been 

 called over of late years by several distinguished writers, some of 

 whom have also been members of the craft of mountaineers. 



Foremost among the few forerunners to be mentioned here stands 

 the name of Leonardo da Vinci. The world recognises him as a 

 supreme artist. The literary or scientific critic knows him as one 

 of the keenest observers, one of the widest and deepest thinkers 

 of a great age, a Baconian before Bacon. Up to his day the 

 scholastic mind had been a closed chamber. The Humanists 

 remained in books. Physical science lives by original investiga- 

 tion and experiment, not in a library. In thought and method 

 Leonardo was a modern ; a mechanical inventor born out of his 

 time ; a philosopher who brushed aside all orthodox hindrances 

 and recognised a universe with constantly receding limits. 



Leonardo's marvellously varied activities are characteristically 

 recorded, not in formal treatises, but in notebooks, sketches, and 

 maps. The multitude of his ideas, his constant habit of verifying 

 them by experiment, his passion for truth, stood in the way of 

 any hasty theorising. A system, being, as he held, nothing else 

 than the inclusion of particular truths in a higher and more 

 comprehensive truth, could only be the result and crown of a 

 life's work. In this respect, at least, we may recognise in him a 

 kindred spirit to the author of the Voyages dans les Alpes, who 

 left unwritten the volume which should have contained his 

 ' Theory of the Earth.' 



Leonardo's interest in the Alps was manifold. He abounds 

 in practical notes that might serve for a modern guide-book. 

 He reports that on the Grigna (the grey mountain opposite 

 Cadenabbia above the Lecco branch of the Lake of Como) are 

 ' the biggest bare cliffs ' he knows ; that Val Sassina (a glen behind 

 it) is full of the 'cose fantastiche ' he delights in ; that there are 

 waterfalls seven hundred feet high on the way up to the Spliigen, 

 which ' it is a pleasure to see ' ; that at the head of the Val Tellina 



