A programme to record how water scours and silts riverbeds and banks
Note to write out every way flowing water removes and deposits earth, and its defences
This recto carries a single memorandum, pencilled and then gone over in pen, setting Leonardo a research programme on the action of moving water. He resolves to write out in how many ways water hollows out the bed and in how many ways it lays earth upon the bed, and to say the same of the banks, where it removes and deposits. He extends the enquiry to how water carves earth from the banks and from cultivated properties where floods run, and to the defences raised against them.
On this page
Catalogue the ways water hollows and silts the bed and banks
Write in how many ways the water hollows out the bottom and in how many ways it lays earth upon the bottom, and say the like of the banks, where it removes and where it deposits. The note frames a systematic survey of scour and deposition by flowing water.
Flood erosion of properties and the defences against it
The memorandum also asks in how many ways the water carves earth from the banks and from the properties where floods run, and to treat of the defences (ripari) raised there. Erosion of worked land and the embankments that resist it are set down as topics to develop.