More Preface

The part I read this morning is Agricola's own preface (as opposed to the translators'). He talks about his book in the context of other books about metals, and also talks about metallurgy in comparison to other human arts.

Farming, he says, is a lot better known and understood than mining, though he thinks mining is at least equal to farming in importance, and at least equally old: "No mortal man ever tilled a field without implements .... When an art is so poor that it lacks metals, it is not of much importance, for nothing is made without tools." Also, he says, you can get a lot richer in mining than in farming. (One might counter that you can't eat metal.) Agricola goes through a list of the ancient sources about the metal arts, which up to then were not very many or comprehensive. The art was presumably passed on in other ways.

Alchemy was popular in Agricola's time, and he lists a whole lot of people including Cleopatra who were searching for ways to transform one metal into another, or claimed to have actually done so. They may have been more or less sincere in this. Agricola states that many are fraudulent and prey on people without knowledge. One purpose of writing this book was to educate the general public about the actual processes used to extract and purify metals, and to separate one metal from another.