COOK, Theodore Andrea. - The Curves of Life; being an account of spiral formations and their application to growth in nature, to science and to art; with special reference to the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci.

London, Constable 1914. Large octavo publisher's red gilt cloth and mildly frayed and rumpled dustwrapper; xxx,479pp, 11 plates and some 415 illustrations through the text. ¶ First edition of this ambitious attempt to formulate a mathematic model that could describe the phenomena of both life and art. Cook is of the optimistic school, with a belief that ''the new spirit at work upon constructive philosophy'' and new methods of communication are leading to thought that is clearer and more critical. He is, he says, in sympathy with Aristotle and Spinoza rather than Comte whose legacy was to reduce science to mere cataloguing. Cook's own legacy is more curiously obscure. While critical thought seems to have abandoned even laughing at the notion that aesthetics can be discerned let alone described, this book along with D'Arcy Thompson's 'On Growth and Form' will be found on every reading list of two groups that are beavering away in ostensibly opposite directions. The first is that of the lovers of occult numbers, the golden mean and the like. The second is laboratory and computer technotypes modelling such things as three dimensional bone structures. Both camps overlap in the realms of Fibonacci numbers and fractals but I am not suggesting that that has any particular meaning. Cook also carries on his argument here, first propounded a few years earlier, that the open spiral staircase at Blois was designed by Leonardo, an attribution that seems to have found general acceptance - at least among the various tourist agencies of the Loire. He is however derisory of the (now equally accepted) proposal that Leonardo also designed the double spiral staircase at nearby Chambord.Hard to find now in decent condition and, if not extinct, definitely endangered in dustwrapper.

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