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GEORGIUS AGRICOLA

DE RE METALLICA

TRANSLATED FROM THE FIRST LATIN EDITION OF 1556

with

Biographical Introduction, Annotations and Appendices upon
the Development of Mining Methods, Metallurgical
Processes, Geology, Mineralogy & Mining Law
from the earliest times to the 16th Century

BY

HERBERT CLARK HOOVER

A. B. Stanford University, Member American Institute of Mining Engineers,
Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, Societe des Ingenieurs
Civils de France, American Institute of Civil Engineers,
Fellow Royal Geographical Society, etc., etc.

AND

LOU HENRY HOOVER

A. B. Stanford University, Member American Association for the
Advancement of Science, The National Geographical Society,
Royal Scottish Geographical Society, etc., etc.

1950

_Dover Publications, Inc._

NEW YORK




TO

JOHN CASPAR BRANNER Ph.D.,

_The inspiration of whose teaching is no less great than his
contribution to science._

This New 1950 Edition of DE RE METALLICA is a complete and unchanged
reprint of the translation published by The Mining Magazine, London, in
1912. It has been made available through the kind permission of
Honorable Herbert C. Hoover and Mr. Edgar Rickard, Author and Publisher,
respectively, of the original volume.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




TRANSLATORS' PREFACE.


There are three objectives in translation of works of this character: to
give a faithful, literal translation of the author's statements; to give
these in a manner which will interest the reader; and to preserve, so
far as is possible, the style of the original text. The task has been
doubly difficult in this work because, in using Latin, the author
availed himself of a medium which had ceased to expand a thousand years
before his subject had in many particulars come into being; in
consequence he was in difficulties with a large number of ideas for
which there were no corresponding words in the vocabulary at his
command, and instead of adopting into the text his native German terms,
he coined several hundred Latin expressions to answer his needs. It is
upon this rock that most former attempts at translation have been
wrecked. Except for a very small number, we believe we have been able to
discover the intended meaning of such expressions from a study of the
context, assisted by a very incomplete glossary prepared by the author
himself, and by an exhaustive investigation into the literature of these
subjects during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That discovery
in this particular has been only gradual and obtained after much labour,
may be indicated by the fact that the entire text has been
re-typewritten three times since the original, and some parts more
often; and further, that the printer's proof has been thrice revised. We
have found some English equivalent, more or less satisfactory, for
practically all such terms, except those of weights, the varieties of
veins, and a few minerals. In the matter of weights we have introduced
the original Latin, because it is impossible to give true equivalents
and avoid the fractions of reduction; and further, as explained in the
Appendix on Weights it is impossible to say in many cases what scale the
Author had in mind. The English nomenclature to be adopted has given
great difficulty, for various reasons; among them, that many methods and
processes described have never been practised in English-speaking mining
communities, and so had no representatives in our vocabulary, and we
considered the introduction of German terms undesirable; other methods
and processes have become obsolete and their descriptive terms with
them, yet we wished to avoid the introduction of obsolete or unusual
English; but of the greatest importance of all has been the necessity to
avoid rigorously such modern technical terms as would imply a greater
scientific understanding than the period possessed.

Agricola's Latin, while mostly free from mediaeval corruption, is
somewhat tainted with German construction. Moreover some portions have
not the continuous flow of sustained thought which others display, but
the fact that the writing of the work extended over a period of twenty
years, sufficiently explains the considerable variation in style. The
technical descriptions in the later books often take the form of
House-that-Jack-built sentences which have had to be at least partially
broken up and the subject occasionally re-introduced. Ambiguities were
also sometimes found which it was necessary to carry on into the
translation. Despite these criticisms we must, however, emphasize that
Agricola was infinitely clearer in his style than his contemporaries
upon such subjects, or for that matter than his successors in almost any
language for a couple of centuries. All of the illustrations and display
letters of the original have been reproduced and the type as closely
approximates to the original as the printers have been able to find in a
modern font.

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