Georgius Agricola

Georgius Agricola (born March 24, 1494, Glauchau, Saxony [Germany]—died November 21, 1555, Chemnitz) was a German scholar and scientist known as “the father of mineralogy.” While a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet singularly independent of the theories of ancient authorities. He was indeed among the first to found a natural science upon observation, as opposed to speculation. His De re metallica dealt chiefly with the arts of mining and smelting, and his De natura fossilium, considered the first mineralogy textbook, presented the first scientific classification of minerals (based on their physical properties) and described many new minerals and their occurrence and mutual relationships.

Life

Agricola was born of obscure parentage. From 1514 to 1518 he studied classics, philosophy, and philology at the University of Leipzig, which had recently been exposed to the humanist revival. Following the custom of the times, he Latinized his name to Georgius Agricola. After teaching Latin and Greek from 1518 to 1522 in a school in Zwickau, he returned to Leipzig to begin the study of medicine but found the university in disarray because of theological quarrels. A lifelong Catholic, he left in 1523 for more congenial surroundings in Italy. He studied medicine, natural science, and philosophy in Bologna and Padua, finishing with clinical studies in Venice.

For two years Agricola worked at the Aldine Press in Venice, principally in preparing an edition of Galen’s works on medicine (published in 1525). In this task he collaborated with John Clement, who had been Thomas More’s secretary during the writing of Utopia. More’s book may well have influenced Agricola to concern himself later with the laws and social customs of the Saxon mining district. In Italy he also met and won the friendship of the great scholar Erasmus, who encouraged him to write and later published several of his books. (Erasmus wrote an introduction to Agricola’s first book, the mineralogical treatise Bermannus. Agricola shared that honour only with More and three other scholars.)

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In 1526 Agricola returned to Saxony, and from 1527 to 1533 he was town physician in Joachimsthal, a mining town in the richest metal-mining district of Europe. Partly in the hope of finding new drugs among the ores and minerals of his adopted district (a hope eventually to be disappointed), he spent all his spare time visiting mines and smelting plants, talking to the better-educated miners, and reading Classical authors on mining. These years shaped the rest of his life and provided the subject matter for most of his books, beginning with Bermannus; sive, de re metallica (1530), a treatise on the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) mining district. There are indications that he owned a share in a silver mine.

Agricola appears not to have been particularly distinguished as a physician, though in this pursuit he made use of direct observation rather than of received authority. He introduced the practice of quarantine into Germany, and his books make many references to miners’ occupational diseases. In 1533 he became town physician in Chemnitz, where he remained to the end of his life.

In 1546 Duke Maurice, elector of Saxony, appointed Agricola burgomaster (mayor) of Chemnitz. He also served as an emissary in the Protestant ruler Maurice’s ambiguous negotiations with Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor. The religious wars of the period rapidly eroded the tolerance that had hitherto prevailed in the Protestant German states, a tolerance from which Agricola had benefited.

Apart from his diplomatic role, Agricola took only limited interest in politics. His youthful “Turkish Speech” of 1529, a vigorous call to the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I to undertake a war against the Turks, was a patriotic hymn to Germany and a call to political and religious unity. It made a great impression on the public and was often reprinted.

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Chief works

Agricola’s magnum opus, for which the treatise Bermannus was a prelude, was De re metallica, published posthumously in 1556. In it, among other things, Agricola surveys historical and Classical allusions to metals and assesses the content and distribution of metal mines in antiquity. He treats the pattern of ownership and the system of law governing Saxon mines, together with the details of their day-to-day labour management. He was mainly concerned, however, with mining and metallurgy, and he discussed the geology of ore bodies, surveying, mine construction, pumping, and ventilation. There is much on the application of waterpower. He describes the assaying of ores, the methods used for enriching ores before smelting, and procedures for smelting and refining a number of metals, and he concludes with a discussion of the production of glass and of a variety of chemicals used in smelting operations.

In De natura fossilium (the book on which rests his right to be regarded as the father of mineralogy), Agricola offers a classification of minerals (called “fossils” at that time) in terms of geometric form (spheres, cones, plates). He was probably the first to distinguish between “simple” substances and “compounds.” In Agricola’s day, chemical knowledge was almost nonexistent, and there was no proper chemical analysis (other than analysis of ores by the use of fire), so the classification of ores was necessarily crude.

In several other books, notably De natura eorum quae effluunt ex terra (1546) and De ortu et causis subterraneorum (1546), Agricola describes his ideas on the origin of ore deposits in veins and correctly attributes them to deposition from aqueous solution. He also describes in detail the erosive action of rivers and its effect in the shaping of mountains. His readiness to discard received authority, even that of Classical authors such as Aristotle and Pliny, is impressive.

Agricola’s scholarly contemporaries regarded him highly. Erasmus prophesied in 1531 that he would “shortly stand at the head of the princes of scholarship.” Later Goethe was to liken him to Francis Bacon. Melanchthon praised his “grace of presentation and unprecedented clarity.” The mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president), who translated De re metallica into English in 1912, regarded Agricola as the originator of the experimental approach to science, “the first to found any of the natural sciences upon research and observation, as opposed to previous fruitless speculation.”