Glimpses of the Independent Scholars

I'm working on the da Vinci profile. It's coming along, but a couple of my books are still in storage and there are some quotes I really want to use in this very special biography. After all, only the best for Leonardo. He will arrive when he is ready.

These mystery lifelong learners or independent scholars--who are they? Among them you will find:

• A physicist who studied just "for the pleasure of finding things out"
• A surgeon who has operated on more than 60,000 patients
• A wandering man who wrote 86 novels
• A forgotten giant with a vision of global ecology and human fellowship

They are waiting in the wings and will be presented shortly. As to the rest, they will arrive when they are ready.

Sala delle Asse in Milan

Just had to share this "painting" I discovered while trying to find where da Vinci mentioned tree rings. (Still working on that, but you never know what you may find when going on one of these adventures.)

This is actually a fresco on the ceiling and vault in Sforza's castle in Milan. It's intriguing because according to Loadstar's Lair, which I found in my "trees and da Vinci" search, it is made up of eighteen willow (one meaning of vinci is willow) trees. By the way, this is a beautiful website with many of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings and their history, plus a timeline and biographical information.

Leonardo da Vinci and A. E. Douglass

So, what do da Vinci and Andrew Ellicott Douglass have in common? I ran across an article in TIME, Tree Clocks, about Florence Hawley's study of tree ring growth that started with this, "Leonardo da Vinci seems first to have noticed that widths of tree rings vary in wet and dry years..."

This was so interesting that I forgot to read the rest of the article and even had to do a search to find the article again so I could add the name of the researcher to this post. As usual, I was off on another mission.

I found two quotes from da Vinci's writings, but no where can I find what texts these quotes came from. I will pursue this and post an update. Anyway, here are the quotes:

“Rings in the branches of sawed trees show the number of years and, according to their thickness, the years which were more or less dry. Thus, they reflect the individual worlds to which they belong, in the north [of Italy] they are much thicker than in the south.”

"The rings in cut stems (or branches) show their number of years, as well as those years that were moister or dryer, according their larger or smaller width."

You never know when you'll learn about another area of science that Leonardo da Vinci investigated and wrote about.

Back to what da Vinci and Douglass have in common--tree rings. Douglass is considered to be the founder of modern dendrochronology. We'll be writing a profile of A.E. Douglass over on The Coconino Chronicles and I'll try to post the link to that when I get it up.