XXVI.

PREFACE

mines, and the fortunes of many kings have been much amplified there-by. But I will not now speak more of these matters, because I havedealt with these subjects partly in the first book of this work, and partly inthe other work entitled De Veteribus et Novis Metallis, where I have refutedthe charges which have been made against metals and against miners.Now, though the art of husbandry, which I willingly rank with the art ofmining, appears to be divided into many branches, yet it is not separatedinto so many as this art of ours, nor can I teach the principles of this aseasily as Columella did of that. He had at hand many writers upon hus-bandry whom he could follow,—in fact, there are more than fifty Greekauthors 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 , 3 and he expounds only a very few methods ofdigging ores and of making metals. Far from the whole of the art havingbeen treated by any one writer, those who have written occasionally on anyone or another of its branches have not even dealt completely with a singleone of them. Moreover, there is a great scarcity even of these, since alone ofall the Greeks, Strato of Lampsacus , 4 the successor of Theophrastus , 6 wrotea book on the subject, De MacMnis Metallicis ; except, perhaps a work by thepoet Philo, a small part of which embraced to some degree the occupationof mining.® Pherecrates seems to have introduced into his comedy, whichwas similar in title, miners as slaves or as persons condemned to serve in themines. Of the Latin writers, Pliny, as I have already said, has describeda few methods of working. Also among the authors I must include the modemwriters, whosoever they are, for no one should escape just condemnationwho fails to award due recognition to persons whose writings he uses, evenvery slightly. Two books have been written in our tongue ; the one on theassaying of mineral substances and metals, somewhat confused, whose authoris unknown 7 ; the other “ On Veins,” of which Pandulfus Anglus 8 is alsosaid to have written, although the German book was written by Calbus ofFreiberg, 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.

4 This work is not extant, as Agricola duly notes later on. Strato succeeded Theo-phrastus as president of the Lyceum, 288 b.c.

6 For note on Theophrastus see Appendix B.

6 It appears that the poet Philo did write a work on mining which is not extant. Sofar as we know the only reference to this work is in Athenseus’ (200 a.d.) Deifinosofihistae.The passage as it appears in C. D. Yonge’s Translation (Bohn’s Library, London, 1854,Vol. 11, 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.

7 The title given by Agricola De Materiae Metallicae et Metallorum Experiment0 isdifficult to identify. It seems likely to be the little Probier Biichlein, numbers of which werepublished in German in the first half of the 16th Century. We discuss this work at somelength in the Appendix B on Ancient Authors.

®Pandulfus, “ the Englishman,” is mentioned by various 15th and 16th Centurywriters, and in the preface of Mathias Farinator’s Liber Moralitatum . . . Rerum Naturalium,etc., printed in Augsburg, 1477, there is a list of books among which appears a reference toa work by Pandulfus on veins and minerals. We have not been able to find the book.