Georgius Agricola, (Latin), German Georg Bauer, (born March 24, 1494, Glauchau, Saxony [Germany]—died November 21, 1555, Chemnitz), German scholar and scientist often called “the father of mineralogy.” While a extremely educated classicist and humanist, properly regarded by students of his personal and later occasions, he was but singularly impartial of the theories of historic authorities. He was certainly among the many first to discovered a pure science upon statement, versus hypothesis. His De re metallica dealt mainly with the humanities of mining and smelting, and his De natura fossilium, thought-about the primary mineralogy textbook, introduced the primary scientific classification of minerals (primarily based on their bodily properties) and described many new minerals and their incidence and mutual relationships.
Agricola was born of obscure parentage. From 1514 to 1518 he studied classics, philosophy, and philology on the University of Leipzig, which had lately been uncovered to the humanist revival. Following the customized of the occasions, he Latinized his identify to Georgius Agricola. After educating Latin and Greek from 1518 to 1522 in a faculty in Zwickau, he returned to Leipzig to start the research of medication however discovered the college in disarray due to theological quarrels. A lifelong Catholic, he left in 1523 for extra congenial environment in Italy. He studied medication, pure science, and philosophy in Bologna and Padua, ending with medical research in Venice.
For two years Agricola labored on the Aldine Press in Venice, principally in getting ready an version of Galen’s works on medication (revealed in 1525). In this process he collaborated with John Clement, who had been Thomas More’s secretary throughout the writing of Utopia. More’s e-book might properly have influenced Agricola to concern himself later with the legal guidelines and social customs of the Saxon mining district. In Italy he additionally met and gained the friendship of the good scholar Erasmus, who inspired him to put in writing and later revealed a number of of his books. (Erasmus wrote an introduction to Agricola’s first e-book, the mineralogical treatise Bermannus. Agricola shared that honour solely with More and three different students.)
In 1526 Agricola returned to Saxony, and from 1527 to 1533 he was city doctor in Joachimsthal, a mining city within the richest metal-mining district of Europe. Partly within the hope of discovering new medicine among the many ores and minerals of his adopted district (a hope finally to be dissatisfied), he spent all his spare time visiting mines and smelting crops, speaking to the better-educated miners, and studying Classical authors on mining. These years formed the remainder of his life and supplied the subject material for many of his books, starting with Bermannus; sive, de re metallica (1530), a treatise on the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) mining district. There are indications that he owned a share in a silver mine.
Agricola seems to not have been significantly distinguished as a doctor, although on this pursuit he made use of direct statement relatively than of acquired authority. He launched the apply of quarantine into Germany, and his books make many references to miners’ occupational illnesses. In 1533 he grew to become city doctor in Chemnitz, the place he remained to the tip of his life.
In 1546 Duke Maurice, elector of Saxony, appointed Agricola burgomaster (mayor) of Chemnitz. He additionally served as an emissary within the Protestant ruler Maurice’s ambiguous negotiations with Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor. The spiritual wars of the interval quickly eroded the tolerance that had hitherto prevailed within the Protestant German states, a tolerance from which Agricola had benefited.
Apart from his diplomatic function, Agricola took solely restricted curiosity in politics. His youthful “Turkish Speech” of 1529, a vigorous name to the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I to undertake a battle towards the Turks, was a patriotic hymn to Germany and a name to political and non secular unity. It made an incredible impression on the general public and was usually reprinted.
Agricola’s magnum opus, for which the treatise Bermannus was a prelude, was De re metallica, revealed posthumously in 1556. In it, amongst different issues, Agricola surveys historic and Classical allusions to metals and assesses the content material and distribution of steel mines in antiquity. He treats the sample of possession and the system of regulation governing Saxon mines, along with the small print of their day-to-day labour administration. He was primarily involved, nonetheless, with mining and metallurgy, and he mentioned the geology of ore our bodies, surveying, mine development, pumping, and air flow. There is far on the appliance of waterpower. He describes the assaying of ores, the strategies used for enriching ores earlier than smelting, and procedures for smelting and refining numerous metals, and he concludes with a dialogue of the manufacturing of glass and of quite a lot of chemical compounds utilized in smelting operations.
In De natura fossilium (the e-book on which rests his proper to be considered the daddy of mineralogy), Agricola presents a classification of minerals (known as “fossils” at the moment) by way of geometric kind (spheres, cones, plates). He was most likely the primary to tell apart between “simple” substances and “compounds.” In Agricola’s day, chemical data was virtually nonexistent, and there was no correct chemical evaluation (aside from evaluation of ores by means of hearth), so the classification of ores was essentially crude.
In a number of different books, notably De natura eorum quae effluunt ex terra (1546) and De ortu et causis subterraneorum (1546), Agricola describes his concepts on the origin of ore deposits in veins and appropriately attributes them to deposition from aqueous answer. He additionally describes intimately the erosive motion of rivers and its impact within the shaping of mountains. His readiness to discard acquired authority, even that of Classical authors similar to Aristotle and Pliny, is spectacular.
Agricola’s scholarly contemporaries regarded him extremely. Erasmus prophesied in 1531 that he would “shortly stand at the head of the princes of scholarship.” Later Goethe was to liken him to Francis Bacon. Melanchthon praised his “grace of presentation and unprecedented clarity.” The mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president), who translated De re metallica into English in 1912, regarded Agricola because the originator of the experimental method to science, “the first to found any of the natural sciences upon research and observation, as opposed to previous fruitless speculation.”