THE DAWN OF MODERN CHEMISTRY 13 



attempt to give a sober, sensible and intelligent description of the 

 technical chemistry within his knowledge. It is interesting also be- 

 cause it preceded the greater work of Agricola by about sixteen years 

 and is mentioned by the latter as having been in his hands, though it 

 contained little that was of use to him. 



While Biringuccio is known only through his one book, the works 

 of Agricola are more numerous. They are chiefly upon minerology, 

 mining or geology. He began publishing about 1530, but his great 

 work, "De re Metallic," appeared in 1556. Agricola was a man of 

 university training, and a scholar of fine type. He had studied in 

 Italy and was a physician by profession. He was city physician at 

 Joachimsthal in Bohemia, and later at Chemnitz in Saxony. His 

 location in these mining centers gave him ample opportunity to become 

 interested in mining and mineralogy and in the chemical operations 

 used in metallurgy and assaying. The great work above referred to is 

 for the time a very remarkably clear description of the operations of 

 mining, smelting and assaying, with very complete description of the 

 chemistry of these arts as known to the miners of the time and region. 

 He does not claim apparently to have contributed original work to 

 these arts, but the work of Agricola may justly be considered as the 

 first really great work in the line of the scientific presentation of a 

 chemical industry, a worthy pioneer to the many great technical works 

 which have since appeared in so many lines of chemical industry. Its 

 influence in its own field was immediate, as shown by the later editions 

 called for and even still more by the number of similar though less 

 important treatises which followed its appearance. 



Bernard Palissy was a man of much less scholarship than Agricola. 

 What he lacked in that respect he compensated for in an unconquerable 

 enthusiasm in experimentation in the field which most interested him — > 

 the making of pottery and its glazes and enamels. He was a real inves- 

 tigator in his field, and his published works describe his experiments 

 and discuss them clearly with neither the dogmatism nor the mystical 

 jargon that most chemical writings of the previous centuries, or even 

 of the subsequent century, exhibit. His works published between 1557 

 and 1580 may be said to have done much the same for the arts of 

 the potter that the work of Agricola did for mining and the chemistry 

 of metallurgy, with the difference that Palissy's work was rather a pres- 

 entation of the result of his own labors than a complete compendium 

 of existing knowledge and practise as was the " De re Metallica." 



It can not be claimed either for Agricola or for Palissy that they 

 were free from the prevalent superstitions or mystical ideas that were 

 almost universally entertained in their century — but it can be asserted 

 that they kept their constructive labor and thought free from obstruc- 

 tion from such notions. Both repudiated the transmutation ideas of 

 the alchemists as vain and profitless, and both endeavored to make their 



