Meanwhile he had been working on the monument, redesigning it to conform to the practical needs of casting. Now it had reached an even grander scale—a colossus that would require two hundred thousand pounds of bronze! He recorded in his notes the very day that this work was started, “On the twenty-third day of April 1490 I commenced this book and recommenced the horse.” The “horse,” of course, was the monument and “this book” referred to still another subject which had grown out of his studies of anatomy and perspective. The title of the proposed book was to be _Light and Shade_. It would include the subject of optics or the mechanism of the eye, the problems of reflection and refraction and it would lead him eventually to a re-examination of his studies of the sun and moon. In Leonardo’s day, and even for a long while afterwards, the popular belief of vision was one that had originally been put forth by the Platonic school and expanded by Euclid and Ptolemy. This belief was that the eye sent forth rays that brought back the image to the soul. Leonardo, in his younger days, had believed in the same theory. Not content with what had been written on the subject, however, he began to experiment for himself. These experiments led him to an examination of the eye itself. He noted the various parts of the eye—the optic foramen or opening, the pigment layer, and the iris. These were already known by the Arabs. Leonardo discovered, however, the crystalline area of the eye. He explained binocular vision, or three-dimensional images, by correctly noting the positions of the two eyes in the head. He described the variations in the diameter of the pupil according to the surrounding light. Further experiments with light brought him to the conclusion that light and images are received by the eye. He took a piece of paper, for example, and pierced it with a small hole. With this he looked at the source of light. He noted the cone shape of the rays funneling into the tiny hole and then when the paper was held next to a white wall he noted that the rays spread out again. He established that light travels in straight lines. He constructed the first “camera obscura”—a box with a small hole in it. Inside the box an object was placed near the hole and behind that a lighted candle. When the box was closed the image of the object was cast on the wall. Leonardo was already acquainted with lenses, and he placed a magnifying lens over the hole to create an enlarged image. [Illustration: _Leonardo’s “camera obscura” which he used for projecting an image of an object on a wall or screen._]