xxvi. PREFACE 



mines, and the fortunes of many kings have been much ampUfied there- 

 by. 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 wiUingly 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 hus- 

 bandr}' whom he could follow, — in fact, there are more than fifty Greek 

 authors whom Marcus Varro enumerates, and more than ten Latin ones, 

 whom Columella himself mentions. I have only one whom I can follow ; 

 that is C. Plinius Secundus,' 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 wdth a single 

 one of them. Moreover, there is a great scarcity even of these, since alone of 

 all the Greeks, Strato of Lampsacus,* the successor of Theophrastus,* 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.* 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 modem 

 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 unknown' ; the other " On Veins," of which Pandulfus Anglus ^ 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 The«- 

 phrastus as president of the Lyceum, 288 B.C. 



•For note on Theophrastus see Appendix B. 



•It 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 Athenreus' (200 a.d.) Deipnosophistae. 

 The passage as it appears in C. D. Yonge's Translation (Bohn's Library, London, 1854, 

 Vol. II, 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 

 diflScult to identify. It seems likely to be the little Probier Buchlein, numbers of which were 

 published in German in the first half of the i6th Century. We discuss this work at some 

 length in the Appendix B on Ancient Authors. 



•Pandulfus, " the Englishman," is mentioned by various 15th and i6th Century 

 writers, and in the preface of Mathias Farinator's Liher Moralitatitm . . . Rerum Naturalium, 

 etc., printed in Augsburg, 1477, there is a list of books among which appears a reference to 

 a work by Pandulfus on veins and minerals. We have not been able to find the book. 



