Sabbath in the mines

Toward the end of chapter 5, Agricola tells us something about miners' working hours in his society.

The day was split into 3 shifts, each being 7 hours long, with the extra hour needed to get people in and out of the mine shaft. The night shift was dangerous, and only used "when necessary." Also, he recommends against putting a miner on two consecutive day shifts: they get tired. Sometimes, miners working a double shift actually fell asleep, and if not that, their work suffered. In some places, a double shift was allowed because the pay wasn't enough to live on.

The miners didn't work on Sundays for religious reasons, and they had Saturdays off as well to take care of their shopping and such like.

Agricola on petroleum

I haven't been keeping this blog up as promised. Reading about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has made me realize how little I really know about oil wells and oil drilling. This sort of thing isn't taught in the school curriculum (maybe it should be).

Skipping ahead a few hundred pages, Agricola does have a few things to say about petroleum, which in his time was drawn from surface springs or relatively shallow tunnels. It was refined by boiling in a pot, thus separating what he calls "salt" from "oil of bitumen," which he notes, stays liquid no matter how long you boil it. He says it is highly prized, though he doesn't say exactly what for (Hoover suggests it was used in lamps).

In Book IV Agricola also starts to talk about who owns the mine? ideas which also are relevant when we try to understand what's happening in the Gulf. In his day and also in ours, someone either a person or the government usually owned the land. If a person owns the land, the government still also has an interest in that land. But anyone who found a valuable mine under the ground had an interesting set of rights as well. The first person discovering a vein had the right to work a certain measured area of that vein.

Hoover's commentary goes into much more detail about the overlapping, sometimes conflicting rights of the Overlord, the State, the Landlord or landowner, and the Mine Operator. The king often claimed the metals, while the landowner often claimed the metals together with the land where they were located. But the miners seem to have established a different sort of right by virtue of their expertise, labor, risks and dangers.

"There are other points where the Overlord, the State, or the Landlord have always considered that they had a right to interfere, principally as to the way the miner does his work... Somebody has had to keep peace and settle disputes among the usually turbulent miners (for what other sort of operators would undertake the hazards and handicaps?)" Not much has changed, has it?

Hidden Landscapes

Agricola describes, and sketches, many types and configurations of ore deposits beneath the earth's surface. Venae profundae (deep veins), venae dilatatae (spread-out veins) and venae cumulatae (not really veins at all, but accumulations, like a lake). There are many variations and combinations. For example, veins might bend, or slope more or less, extend from one mountain to the next or from a mountain to a plain, cross, join, or diverge. His pictures show how to visualize while on the surface of the earth, the veins that lie beneath it.

Agricola doesn't miss the resemblance of ore deposits to water formations (lakes and rivers), and he makes the hypothesis that ore deposits formed from "juices" flowing under the earth, like the underground water with which he was also familiar. These juices were solutions of metallic compounds, which formed crystals or deposits over time.

Besides being useful for knowing how and where to dig, this hypothesis is exciting, according to Hoover, in a couple of ways. First, though not "set out with the clarity of Darwin," it represented a leap from the simplistic Genesis thinking that prevailed at that time, to understand that the earth was not formed as it is today, all at one time. Rather, the rocks seem to have formed first and the ore-deposits later. One of Agricola's examples shows what happens when two veins form at different time and they cross, and he explains the resulting formation in terms of geologic change. Another sketch may show the effect of plate tectonics on an existing vein.

A more subtle point has to do with the nature and specialness of metals (and here the footnotes get much longer than the text). The ancients knew that metal was special stuff with special properties, but they weren't sure why. Some of the ancient Greeks saw metal as being related to water - it's shiny, it's liquid at some achievable temperature, and it seems to absorb cold. Alchemists, respected in Agricola's time, considered metal to have almost magical or mystical properties related to heavenly bodies. More practically speaking, metal is very useful and you can't find it just anywhere. A nation or individual lucky enough to have ore deposits on their land can become very wealthy; this could lead to believing that different parts of the earth have inherently more value than others.

It's maybe more true, and maybe a more democratic view to emphasize that metal like everything else is composed of atoms, metals being elements with special properties, but still elements like all the other stuff around us.

Where To Dig

Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes there's a copper deposit, or a silver or even a gold deposit, right there on the surface of the soil, staring you in the face. If you can see something like that, well, go ahead and dig. Dig even if your deposit is in an inconvenient place - say, on the side of a cliff, on a very tall mountain, or in the middle of a big plateau with no water or people anywhere close.

But most of the time it isn't so easy, and when you go prospecting, there isn't a sure chance of finding anything. In that case, you can fall back on some very human advice: Start digging somewhere that you wouldn't mind staying for a while. You're going to need water, wood (for shelter and also, if you do find something, for your underground structures), and settlements near. Water can be piped in, of course, but if there are no settlements nearby, you'll have trouble keeping your workmen happy and they'll go somewhere else.

So, the recommendation is a forest, or a medium-sized mountain, not too far away from town.

Agricola didn't know about that most ubiquitous of metals in our modern age, aluminum. He gives instructions for extracting compounds that contain aluminum (alum and cimolite, a valued clayey substance), but he never knew there was metal locked up in these compounds. In this case, the reader knows more than the writer did.

Investment Advice

You probably haven't gone into mining just for the fun of it, or even just for the common good. Probably, you intended to get rich. Agricola provides some sage advice for how to do that without risking too much of your own capital.

First, he notes that there are some ways of mining that can be done without any capital outlay at all - he's talking about panning gold or tin ore from river beds, or something called trench prospecting. But if you want to explore deeper into the earth, there gets to be more and more risk that you will spend a lot of money and time getting rights to land and digging a big hole, only to find that there's nothing there.

Xenophon advocated having each of ten tribes go digging with the understanding that they would share whatever was found. You'd probably hit some sort of metal deposit in four tries out of the ten. By Agricola's time society had become too complex for that. Mining was more likely either a State enterprise, or undertaken by a private individual with money to invest. But share purchase arrangements also existed, and Agricola provides suggestions for getting the most out of these.

He recommends that one purchase a mixture of high-priced and low-priced shares. These would represent mines that are already productive (the high priced ones), and mines that are not yet productive (unknowns, thus lower priced shares). Some people buy low, then sell at the first sign of an increase, but Agricola recommends that you hold your shares. Many mines are productive for a long time, and they can be valuable even when apparently used-up.

The mining art is complex, and no one understands all of it. So, a successful mine owner needs to delegate, and also needs to know what's going on by living there or at least in the neighborhood, and visiting often.

Not Good Nor Bad

At the conclusion of Book I, Agricola finishes his apologetic for metals as such, with the general point that metals are externals. They are neither good nor bad in themselves, but they can be used well or badly according to the intentions of the person using them. It's ourselves we need to watch out for, not our materials. God made metals, and as part of his creation, they are not wrong or evil.

Having already discussed gold and silver, and the uses and dangers of money at some length, he discusses some problems people have with iron, lead and bronze, mostly in their use as weapons and in instruments of torture (molten lead going back at least to the ancient Greeks). He then enumerates a number of peaceful uses for the same metals-- tools that are used every day, as well as the decorative arts.

He then goes on to the mining profession. There is a certain paradigm that Agricola takes for granted, in which someone owns the land (and therefore controls the mine and its profits); there is a superintendent who distributes shares of the profits; there is a foreman and finally, there are workers. Agricola favors this type of ownership pyramid. He doesn't for example suggest reforming it altogether, regarding the metal as a shared resource and working it as a cooperative. However, he notes some abuses that have occurred and need to be watched out for.

The land ownership piece is critical where mining is concerned because only certain land has mineral deposits. Sometimes, land is outright stolen (Agricola seems to be talking, with bitterness, about some sort of eminent domain arrangement) or taken over through violence. Other times, certain mine superintendents have extorted money from the land owner under false pretenses, and at still other times, mine foremen have been known to conceal productive veins by blocking them with clay, and come back later to get the ore out. And often enough, mines have been worked by slave labor-- though Agricola says this is no longer the case in his time.

Agricola points out that all these abuses are illegal. An intelligent and alert mine owner can obtain justice from the magistrates, or may even be able to prevent them before they start.

Do We Even Need Metal?

More serious issues with mining are set forth today - that is, not only concerns about mining as a career choice for yourself, but as a component of our lifestyle in general. For me, today, it's hard to imagine life with no metal in it at all. But apparently, in Agricola's time some people advocated simply not using any metal - otherwise he wouldn't have felt the need to refute them. It was felt that we are creatures of the earth's surface, made to cultivate the land, but that we are not made for digging under the earth's surface. If you have food, clothing, shelter and exercise, says this school of thought, you don't need metal at all and you'll be better off without it.

One of the concerns is the impact of mining on the environment. The smelting process required heat, which was provided by burning trees. Already in the 16th century, one could notice that whole forests were being cut down and not renewed, and the impact this had on animals whose habitat was in that forest. Also, pollution of streams and rivers was a problem, along with its impact on fish.

Another reason is the impact that some metals (i.e. gold and silver) seemed to have on people, as an incitement to various forms of violence and dishonesty - war, bribery, thievery and so forth. The cruel punishment of thieves is also a form of violence.

As to mining as a career choice, well, it was seen as highly risky, but it's much less risky if a person goes into it with some knowledge and expertise. There were a lot of bad miners out there hacking away mindlessly at any old rock. If you know what you are looking for, the success rate is much higher. Mining is also less stable than farming, though Agricola points to a few specific mines that have been worked for hundreds of years without being exhausted. Finally, there are dangers of working under the earth's surface. Again, Agricola feels these dangers can be lessened if not entirely eliminated, through care and training.