Unruled notebook, blue-green marbled boards, half-bound in red leather; 23.5 × 19 cm. Extant are 38 leaves. At least 4 leaves have been torn out from the end of the notebook. Watermark  J Whatman / Turkey Mill / 1831. 
	Title page (2r):  Practical / GEOMETRY.  The word  Practical  is lettered in a gothic style, while  GEOMETRY  is lettered in the style used for the words  ITERIAD  and  ATHENS  on the title pages to those epics in MS VII (see MS VII,  Description ). Above the title is an ornament consisting of a face surrounded by fancy scroll. While early cataloger’s notes at HL assume that such  ornamental pen work  must be  in another hand  (see Hodson,  Checklist,  196), the ornamented lettering, like that for the title pages of  Iteriad  and  Athens  in MS VII, was likely copied by Ruskin from E. Butterworth, Butterworth’s Young Arithmetician’s Instructor, Containing Specimens of Writing with Directions (Edinburgh, 1815?). Such a text seems an appropriate model for Ruskin’s geometry exercise notebook, but the Young Arithmetician’s Instructor did not necessarily form part of the regimen assigned by Ruskin’s mathematics tutor, Mr. Rowbotham. The Butterworth text had been purchased by John James in 1827 (RFL 168 n. 1), much earlier than Ruskin’s formal mathematics tutoring, and it appears to have been consulted by the family mainly for orthographical instruction and practice (RFL 251, 259). In fact, the exercises that Ruskin labels  problems  in his notebook are more orthographical than mathematical in character, being more concerned with how to draw geometrical shapes accurately than with how to theorize about them--a  practical,  not a pure, geometry.