TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE.

HERE are three objectives in translation of worksof this character : to give a faithful, literal trans-lation of the author’s statements ; to give thesein a manner which will interest the reader ; and topreserve, so far as is possible, the style of theoriginal text. The task has been doubly difficultin this work because, in using Latin, the authoravailed himself of a medium which had ceased toexpand a thousand years before his subject had inmany particulars come into being ; in consequence he was in difficultieswith a large number of ideas for which there were no correspondingwords in the vocabulary at his command, and instead of adopting into thetext his native German terms, he coined several hundred Latin expressionsto answer his needs. It is upon this rock that most former attempts attranslation have been wrecked. Except for a very small number, webelieve we have been able to discover the intended meaning of suchexpressions from a study of the context, assisted by a very incompleteglossary prepared by the author himself, and by an exhaustive investigationinto the literature of these subjects during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. That discovery in this particular has been only gradual andobtained after much labour, may be indicated by the fact that the entiretext has been re-typewritten three times since the original, and someparts more often ; and further, that the printer’s proof has been thrice revised.We have found some English equivalent, more or less satisfactory, forpractically all such terms, except those of weights, the varieties of veins,and a few minerals. In the matter of weights we have introduced theoriginal Latin, because it is impossible to give true equivalents and avoid thefractions of reduction ; and further, as explained in the Appendix on Weights itis impossible to say in many cases what scale the Author had in mind. TheEnglish nomenclature to be adopted has given great difficulty, for variousreasons ; among them, that many methods and processes described havenever been practised in English-speaking mining communities, and so had norepresentatives in our vocabulary, and we considered the introduction ofGerman terms undesirable; other methods and processes have becomeobsolete and their descriptive terms with them, yet we wished to avoidthe introduction of obsolete or unusual English ; but of the greatestimportance of all has been the necessity to avoid rigorously such modemtechnical terms as would imply a greater scientific understanding than theperiod possessed.

Agricola’s Latin, while mostly free from mediaeval corruption, is some-what tainted with German construction. Moreover some portions have not