De Re Metallica-Letter by Agricola Page 27



	xxvi. PREFACE mines, and the fortunes of many kings have been much amplified thereby. But I will not now speak more of these matters, because I have dealt with these subjects partly in the first book of this work, and partly in the other work entitled De Veteribus et Novis Metallis, where I have refuted the charges which have been made against metals and against miners. Now, though the art of husbandry, which I willingly rank with the art of mining, appears to be divided into many branches, yet it is not separated into so many as this art of ours, nor can I teach .the principles of this as easily as Columella did of that. He had at hand many writers upon husbandry whom he could follow,—in fact, there are more than fifty Greek authors whom Marcus Varrò enumerates, and more than ten Latin ones, whom Columella himself mentions. I have only one whom I can follow ; that is C. Plinius Secundus,³ and he expounds only a very few methods of digging ores and of making metals. Far from the whole of the art having been treated by any one writer, those who have written occasionally on any one or another of its branches have not even dealt completely with a single one of them. Moreover, there is a great scarcity even of these, since alone of all the Greeks, Strato of Lampsacus,⁴ the successor of Theophrastus,⁵ wrote a book on the subject, De Machinis Metallicis ; except, perhaps a work by the poet Philo, a small part of which embraced to some degree the occupation of mining.⁶ Pherecrates seems to have introduced into his comedy, which was similar in title, miners as slaves or as persons condemned to serve in the mines. Of the Latin writers, Pliny, as I have already said, has described a few methods of working. Also among the authors I must include the modern writers, whosoever they are, for no one should escape just condemnation who fails to award due recognition to persons whose writings he uses, even very slightly. Two books have been written in our tongue ; the one on the assaying of mineral substances and metals, somewhat confused, whose author is unknown⁷ ; the other " On Veins," of which Pandulfus Anghis ⁸ is also said to have written, although the German book was written by Calbus of Freiberg, a well-known doctor ; but neither of them accomplished the task •We give a short review of Pliny's Naturalis Historia in the Appendix B. This work is not extant, as Agricola duly notes later on. Strato succeeded Theophrastus as president of the Lyceum, 288 b.c. ⁸For note on Theophrastus see Appendix B. ^eIt appears that the poet Philo did write a work on mining which is not extant. So far as we know the only reference to this work is in Athenseus' (200 A.D.) Deipnosophistae. The passage as it appears in C. D. Yonge's Translation (Bohn's Library, London, 1854, Vol. 11, Book vii, p. 506) is : " And there is a similar fish produced in the Red Sea which " is called Stromateus ; it has gold-coloured lines running along the whole of his body, as " Philo tells us in his book on Mines." There is a fragment of a poem of Pherecrates, entitled " Miners," but it seems to have little to do with mining. The title given by Agricola De Materiae Metallicae et Metallorum Experimento is difficult to identify. It seems likely to be the little Probier Büchlein, numbers of which were published in German in the first half of the 16th Century. We discuss this work at some length in the Appendix Β on Ancient Authors. fPandulfus, " the Englishman," is mentioned by various 15th and 16th Century writers, and in the preface of Mathias Farinator's Liber Moralitatum . . . Rerum Naturalium, etc., printed in Augsburg, 1477, there is a list of books among which appears a reference te a work by Pandulfus on veins and minerals. We have not been able to find the book.