Курсовая работа: Домашнее задание 1

Arthur Conan Doyle "The Hound of the Baskervilles".

Chapter 1 Mr. Sherlock Holmes

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a "Penang lawyer." Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. "To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.," was engraved upon it, with the date "1884." It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry--dignified, solid, and reassuring.

"Well, Watson, what do you make of it?"

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

"How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head."

"I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me," said he. "But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor's stick? Since we have been so unfortunate as to miss him and have no notion of his errand, this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it."

"I think," said I, following as far as I could the methods of my companion, "that Dr. Mortimer is a successful, elderly medical man, well-esteemed since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation."

"Good!" said Holmes. "Excellent!"

"I think also that the probability is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot."

"Why so?"

"Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one has been so knocked about that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it. The thick-iron ferrule is worn down, so it is evident that he has done a great amount of walking with it."

"Perfectly sound!" said Holmes.

"And then again, there is the 'friends of the C.C.H.' I should guess that to be the Something Hunt, the local hunt to whose members he has possibly given some surgical assistance, and which has made him a small presentation in return."

"Really, Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt."

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

"Interesting, though elementary," said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. "There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions."

"Has anything escaped me?" I asked with some self-importance. "I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?"

"I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal."

"Then I was right."

"To that extent."

"But that was all."

"No, no, my dear Watson, not all--by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the initials 'C.C.' are placed before that hospital the words 'Charing Cross' very naturally suggest themselves."

"You may be right."

"The probability lies in that direction. And if we take this as a working hypothesis we have a fresh basis from which to start our construction of this unknown visitor."

"Well, then, supposing that 'C.C.H.' does stand for 'Charing Cross Hospital,' what further inferences may we draw?"

"Do none suggest themselves? You know my methods. Apply them!"

"I can only think of the obvious conclusion that the man has practised in town before going to the country."

"I think that we might venture a little farther than this. Look at it in this light. On what occasion would it be most probable that such a presentation would be made? When would his friends unite to give him a pledge of their good will? Obviously at the moment when Dr. Mortimer withdrew from the service of the hospital in order to start a practice for himself. We know there has been a presentation. We believe there has been a change from a town hospital to a country practice. Is it, then, stretching our inference too far to say that the presentation was on the occasion of the change?"

"It certainly seems probable."

"Now, you will observe that he could not have been on the staff of the hospital, since only a man well-established in a London practice could hold such a position, and such a one would not drift into the country. What was he, then? If he was in the hospital and yet not on the staff he could only have been a house-surgeon or a house-physician--little more than a senior student. And he left five years ago--the date is on the stick. So your grave, middle-aged family practitioner vanishes into thin air, my dear Watson, and there emerges a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff."

I laughed incredulously as Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his settee and blew little wavering rings of smoke up to the ceiling.

"As to the latter part, I have no means of checking you," said I, "but at least it is not difficult to find out a few particulars about the man's age and professional career." From my small medical shelf I took down the Medical Directory and turned up the name. There were several Mortimers, but only one who could be our visitor. I read his record aloud.

"Mortimer, James, M.R.C.S., 1882, Grimpen, Dartmoor, Devon. House-surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital. Winner of the Jackson prize for Comparative Pathology, with essay entitled 'Is Disease a Reversion?' Corresponding member of the Swedish Pathological Society. Author of 'Some Freaks of Atavism' (Lancet 1882). 'Do We Progress?' (Journal of Psychology, March, 1883). Medical Officer for the parishes of Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow."

"No mention of that local hunt, Watson," said Holmes with a mischievous smile, "but a country doctor, as you very astutely observed. I think that I am fairly justified in my inferences. As to the adjectives, I said, if I remember right, amiable, unambitious, and absent-minded. It is my experience that it is only an amiable man in this world who receives testimonials, only an unambitious one who abandons a London career for the country, and only an absent-minded one who leaves his stick and not his visiting-card after waiting an hour in your room."

"And the dog?"

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete

by Leonardo Da Vinci

(#3 in our series by Leonardo Da Vinci)

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the

copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing

this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project

Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the

header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the

eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is

important information about your specific rights and restrictions in

how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a

donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Title: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete

Author: Leonardo Da Vinci

Release Date: Jan, 2004 [EBook #5000]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[Most recently updated June 26, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO DA

VINCI, COMPLETE ***

This eBook was produced by Charles Aldarondo and the Distributed

Proofreaders team.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

Volume 1

Translated by Jean Paul Richter

1888

PREFACE.

A singular fatality has ruled the destiny of nearly all the most

famous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most important

were never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time,

which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the Sforza

Monument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while the

third--the picture of the Last Supper at Milan--has suffered

irremediable injury from decay and the repeated restorations to

which it was recklessly subjected during the XVIIth and XVIIIth

centuries. Nevertheless, no other picture of the Renaissance has

become so wellknown and popular through copies of every description.

Vasari says, and rightly, in his Life of Leonardo, "that he laboured

much more by his word than in fact or by deed", and the biographer

evidently had in his mind the numerous works in Manuscript which

have been preserved to this day. To us, now, it seems almost

inexplicable that these valuable and interesting original texts

should have remained so long unpublished, and indeed forgotten. It

is certain that during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries their

exceptional value was highly appreciated. This is proved not merely

by the prices which they commanded, but also by the exceptional

interest which has been attached to the change of ownership of

merely a few pages of Manuscript.

That, notwithstanding this eagerness to possess the Manuscripts,

their contents remained a mystery, can only be accounted for by the

many and great difficulties attending the task of deciphering them.

The handwriting is so peculiar that it requires considerable

practice to read even a few detached phrases, much more to solve

with any certainty the numerous difficulties of alternative

readings, and to master the sense as a connected whole. Vasari

observes with reference to Leonardos writing: "he wrote backwards,

in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that any one who is

not practised in reading them, cannot understand them". The aid of a

mirror in reading reversed handwriting appears to me available only

for a first experimental reading. Speaking from my own experience,

the persistent use of it is too fatiguing and inconvenient to be

practically advisable, considering the enormous mass of Manuscripts

to be deciphered. And as, after all, Leonardo's handwriting runs

backwards just as all Oriental character runs backwards--that is

to say from right to left--the difficulty of reading direct from the

writing is not insuperable. This obvious peculiarity in the writing

is not, however, by any means the only obstacle in the way of

mastering the text. Leonardo made use of an orthography peculiar to

himself; he had a fashion of amalgamating several short words into

one long one, or, again, he would quite arbitrarily divide a long

word into two separate halves; added to this there is no punctuation

whatever to regulate the division and construction of the sentences,

nor are there any accents--and the reader may imagine that such

difficulties were almost sufficient to make the task seem a

desperate one to a beginner. It is therefore not surprising that the

good intentions of some of Leonardo s most reverent admirers should

have failed.

Leonardos literary labours in various departments both of Art and of

Science were those essentially of an enquirer, hence the analytical

method is that which he employs in arguing out his investigations

and dissertations. The vast structure of his scientific theories is

consequently built up of numerous separate researches, and it is

much to be lamented that he should never have collated and arranged

them. His love for detailed research--as it seems to me--was the

reason that in almost all the Manuscripts, the different paragraphs

appear to us to be in utter confusion; on one and the same page,

observations on the most dissimilar subjects follow each other

without any connection. A page, for instance, will begin with some

principles of astronomy, or the motion of the earth; then come the

laws of sound, and finally some precepts as to colour. Another page

will begin with his investigations on the structure of the

intestines, and end with philosophical remarks as to the relations

of poetry to painting; and so forth.

Leonardo himself lamented this confusion, and for that reason I do

not think that the publication of the texts in the order in which

they occur in the originals would at all fulfil his intentions. No

reader could find his way through such a labyrinth; Leonardo himself

could not have done it.

Added to this, more than half of the five thousand manuscript pages

which now remain to us, are written on loose leaves, and at present

arranged in a manner which has no justification beyond the fancy of

the collector who first brought them together to make volumes of

more or less extent. Nay, even in the volumes, the pages of which

were numbered by Leonardo himself, their order, so far as the

connection of the texts was concerned, was obviously a matter of

indifference to him. The only point he seems to have kept in view,

when first writing down his notes, was that each observation should

be complete to the end on the page on which it was begun. The

exceptions to this rule are extremely few, and it is certainly

noteworthy that we find in such cases, in bound volumes with his

numbered pages, the written observations: "turn over", "This is the

continuation of the previous page", and the like. Is not this

sufficient to prove that it was only in quite exceptional cases that

the writer intended the consecutive pages to remain connected, when

he should, at last, carry out the often planned arrangement of his

writings?

What this final arrangement was to be, Leonardo has in most cases

indicated with considerable completeness. In other cases this

authoritative clue is wanting, but the difficulties arising from

this are not insuperable; for, as the subject of the separate