28 brooks: applied geology 



of antiquity during this lapse, made considerable contributions to 

 scientific knowledge, not neglecting mineralogy. Aside from this, 

 there are only a few minor references to the subject in the chron- 

 icles of that time. 



While science was neglected in the middle ages, the arts con- 

 tinued to progress, and among these mining was important. It 

 is recorded that in Charlemagne's time thousands of miners were 

 employed in the metal industry of northern Tyrol, and many other 

 countries made notable contributions to the metallic wealth of the 

 world. Coal mining began in England and Germany in the 

 twelfth century. In fact, the mining industry assumed an im- 

 portance which attests a high degree of administrative and tech- 

 nical skill. 



With the revival of learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries, scholars began again to turn their attention to the 

 natural sciences. At first they labored solely to verify and am- 

 plify the theories of the ancient writers, never doubting that the 

 classical philosophers had encompassed the entire realm of human 

 thought. Generations of scholars sought their science in the 

 Greek and Roman literature. But with the renaissance scholas- 

 tic thought was freed, and then the first epoch of scientific geol- 

 ogy began. 



The wide chasm which separated the academician from the 

 technician at that time prevented any utilization of the great 

 store of geologic facts accumulated by miners. The miner had 

 neither education nor incentive to record the facts so laboriously 

 collected; the scholar had yet to realize that nature must be 

 studied by observation and deduction, not by speculation alone. 

 The cosmogonist wrote his treatises on the origin of the world 

 with his vision limited by academic walls, while the miner held 

 his knowledge as important only for his need. 



Agricola was one of the first scholars to consider the practical 

 problems of the miner. His works, published in the middle of the 

 sixteenth century, show both keen observation and realization of 

 the importance of applied geology. The German mining indus- 

 try had at that time advanced sufficiently to have a large tech- 

 nical vocabulary of its own. But as Agricola wrote in Latin, he 



