DA VINCI A GREAT ANATOMIST.
Leonardo Da Vinci, to his talents as a painter, added that of being the best anatomist and physiologist of his time, and was the first person who introduced the practice of making anatomical drawings. Vassari, in his Lives of the Painters, says that Leonardo made a book of studies, drawn with red chalk, and touched with a pen with great diligence, of such subjects as Marc Antonio de la Torre, an excellent philosopher of that day, had dissected. "And concerning those from part to part, he wrote remarks in letters of an ugly form, which are written by the left hand backwards, and not to be understood but by those who knew the method of reading them; for they are not to be read without a looking-glass." Those very drawings and writings alluded to by Vassari, were happily found to be preserved in the royal collection of original drawings, where Dr. Hunter was permitted to examine them. The Doctor, in noticing them, says: "I expected to see little more than such designs in anatomy as might be useful to the painter in his own profession; but I saw, and, indeed, with astonishment, that Leonardo had been a general and a deep student. When I consider what pains he has taken upon every part of the body, the superiority of his universal genius, his particular excellence in mechanics and hydraulics, and the attention with which such a man would examine and see objects which he was to draw, I am fully persuaded that Leonardo was the best anatomist at that time in the world."