Agricola, Georgius

Agricola, Georgius

also known as Georg Baueer

(b. Glauchau, Germany, 24 March 1494; d. Chemnizt, Germany [now Karl-Marx-Stadt, German Democratic Republic], 21 November 1555)

mining, metallurgy.

Agricola’s father was probably Gregor Bauer, a dyer and woolen draper. His youngest son, Hans Georg’s favorite brother, who joined Georg at Chemnitz in 1540, followed the same profession. The eldest son, Franciscus, became a priest at Zwickau and later at Glauchau. Georg attended various schools in Glauchau, Zwickau, and Magdeburg (1511), and in 1514—rather late, since the average age at matriculation was between twelve and fifteen—he entered Leipzig University. In 1515 he received the B.A. and remained at the university as lecturer in elementary Greek until the was chosen ludi moderator at Zwickau in 1517. In 1519, as rector extraordinarius, he organized the new Schola Graeca and wrote his first work, De prima ac simplict institutione grammatica (1520). This short booklet is an excellent specimen of the new humanistice pedagogy, with interesting examples taken from a schoolboy’s experiences.

Zwickau was a center of the Reformation, and although Agricola believed a reformation was necessary, he did not approve of its revolutionary aspects. He therefore returned to Leipzig in 1523 to study medicine under Heinrich Stromer von Auerbach; to support himself, he had been endowed with the prebend of the St. Erasmus altar for three years by the council of Zwickau. This enabled him to visit Italy, and on his way he stopped in Basel to pay his respects to Erasmus. Agricola spent three years at Bologna and Venice as a member of the editorial staff for the Aldina editions of Galen and Hippocrates. He also joined the English group headed by Edward Wotton and John Clement, son-in-law of Sir Thomas More. This group may have aroused Agricola’s interest in politics and economics.

Following the route through the mining districts in Carinthia, Styria, and the Tyrol, Agricola returned to Germany in the fall of 1526 with the M.D. and a wife the widow of Thomas Meiner, director of the Schneeberg mining district. The following spring he was elected town physician and apothecary of St. Joachimsthal (now Jachymov), Czechoslovakia. Here he continued his studies on the pharmaceutical use of minerals and smelting products, with a view to compiling comments on Galen and Hippocrates.

In those days St. Joachimsthal was the most important mining center in Europe besides Schwaz in the Tyrol. Miners and smelters, some of whom suffered from occupational diseases, were crowded together. Agricola studied not only their ailments but also their life, labor, and equipment. Day and night he visited the mines and the smoky smelting houses, and soon he had an excellent knowledge of mining and metallurgy. He recorded his impressions in Bermannus sive de re metallica dialogue (1530).

The success of this pioneer delineation of mining and metallurgy was assured by Erasmus, who contributed a letter of recommendation. Agricola was now a well-known author, and he indefatigably sustained his reputation with a flow of important books The next ones were political and economic: Oratio de bello adversus Turcam suscipiendo (1531) and De mensuris et ponderibus (1533).

Since there were too many demands on his time in St. Joachimsthal, Agricola decided to return to Chemnitz, to be town physician in this quieter, smaller town on the northern slope of the Erzgebirge. Chemnitz had a copper smelter which was used to extract silver from the ore. Agricola’s knowledge of mining enabled him to profit from mining shares. He always seemed to enter into the right partnership and to avoid profitless ventures. By 1542 he was one of the twelve richest inhabitants of Chemnitz. After fifteen years of hard work he succeeded in finishing a complete series of inquiries concerning the principles of geology and mineralogy.

This series must be considered his greatest scientific achievement. It had not yet been published when Agricola became involved in the war of Emperor Charles V against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League: he was elected mayor of Chemnitz, appointed a councillor to the court of Saxony, and sent as an ambassador to the emperor and his younger brother Ferdinand, king of Bohemia. For more than three years Agricola was with the councillors of Moritz, duke of Saxony, as one of the few Roman Catholic representatives at the Protestant court. He never wrote about the diplomatic missions he was charged with, but we may assume that his parleys with the Catholic emperor’s commanders and diplomats were effective. He was not able to return to his scientific work until 1548, but new books appeared soon after: De animantibus subterraneis (1549) and an enlarged edition of De mensuris et ponderibus (1550).

In 1550 Agricola returned to St. Joachimsthal for some weeks. He saw a very changed situation: the prosperity was gone. nearly all of the ruling family had been deposed or expelled, and some of the new royal officials had not the slightest idea of the needs of the town and its inhabitants. Agricola gave a 5,000–thaler credit worth 2,000 cows in those days to the counts Schlick to promote prospecting for new deposits, a search that was successful. He went home to Chemnitz conscious of having done a good deed, and with him lie took the finished text of his chief work, De re metallica libel XII, begun twenty years before in St. Joachimsthal. During his visit to St. Joachimsthal he had met the expert designer Blasius Weffring, who spent the next three years illustrating the text.

When the black plague spread through Saxony in 1552–1553, Agricola worked day and night, going from the pesthouses to his family, always fearing that he would bring the contagion with him; one daughter did die of the plague. His first wife had died in 1541, and the following year he had married Anna Schütz, daughter of the guild master and smelter owner Ulrich Schütz who had entrusted his wife and children to Agricola’s guardianship when he died in 1534. His studies during the plague led Agricola to publish De peste libri III (1554).

Agricola could not retire until another work was finished. In 1534 Georg the Whiskered, duke of Saxony and a patron of the Catholic church, had nominated Agricola as historiographer of the court of Saxony, probably with the hope of discovering genealogical claims on territories by heirs–at–law. For twenty years Agricola studied yellowed parchments and old chronicles. His honesty forbade him to conceal the rulers’ mistakes uncovered during his research: he was a scholar, not a courtier. He recorded his findings very frankly much to the disappointment of Augustus, third duke after Georg the Whiskered. It is no wonder, then, that the Sippschaji des Hausses zu Sachssen, an evaluation of all the rulers of Saxony, remained unpublished until 1963..

Augustus ignored the dedication dated 9 August 1555, but more important is that of 18 March 1555, for the second, enlarged edition of the mineralogical works (1558). It contains Agricola’s most quoted words on peace and war, written before the Peace of Augsburg (September 1555), when war between the Catholic and Protestant confessions seemed imminent. For Agricola, that decisive agreement was the end of all his hopes for a reunion in faith. He fell ill soon after and died after suffering a relapse in November.

After Agricola’s death the religious struggle renewed over his corpse. The Protestant clergy refused to allow his being buried in the parish church at Chemnitz, an honor traditionally accorded to mayors: and it was only through the intervention of his old friend Julius von Pflug, bishop of Zeitz–Naumburg, that he was interred in the cathedral at Zeitz.

Four months after his death, De re ntetallica libri XII, illustrated with 292 woodcuts, appeared. A year later an Old German translation by Philippus Bech was published using the same woodcuts, which were used for 101 years in seven editions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Agricola’s writings include De pima ac simplici instinttione grammatica (Leipzig, 1520); Bernunmus sire de re metallica dialogus (Basel, 1530: Paris, 1541); Oratio de hello adversus Tmram suscipiendo, original Latin ed. (Basel, 1538), in Old German as Oration, Anrede and Vermanung... widderden Tiircken, Lorenz Bermann. trans. (Dresden –NLire inberg, 1531); De mensuris et ponderibus (Basel–Paris, 1533: Venice, 1535). reissued as De mensuris et ponderibus Romanorum aique Graecorum libri V (Basel, 1550), with the following additions: De externis mensuris et ponderibus, Brevis defensio, De mensuris quibus intervalla metimur, De restituendis mensuris atque ponder–ibus, and De precio metallorum et monetis, the big foliant, containing De ortu et causis subterraneorum, De natura eorum quae effluunt e terra, De natura fossilium, De veteribus et novis metallis, Bermannus sive de re metallica dialogus (revised), and Interpretatio Germanica vocum rei metallicae addito indice foecundissimo (Basel, 1546; 2nd ed., rev. and enl., Basel, 1558) De natura fossilium was translated into English by Mark C. Bandy and Jean A. Bandy (New York, 1955); De animantibus subterraneis (Basel, 1549); De peste libri III (Basel, 1554); Sippschaft des Hausses zu Sachssen (1555), in Ausgewahlte Werke, V11, 77–416; and De re metallica libri XII (Basel, 1556, 1561, 1621, 1657), translated into English, with biographical introduction, annotations, and appendixes by Henry Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (London, 1912; new ed. [unchanged], New York, 1950).

Nearly all of Agricola’s works are brought together in Ausgewahlte Werke, 12 vols., incl. supps., Hans Prescher, ed. (Berlin, 1955–).

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Agricola are Bern Dibner, Agricola on Metals, Burndy Library Publication no. 15 (Norwalk, Conn., 1958); Erwin Herlitzius, G. A. Seine Weltanschauung and seine Leistung als Wegbereiter einer materialistischen Naturauffassung, Freiberger Forschungsheft no. D32 (Berlin, 1960); William B. Parsons, Engineers and Engineering in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1939); Georg Spackeler, ed., Georgius Agricola 1555–1955 (Berlin, 1955); and Helmut M. Wilsdorf, Praludien zu Agricola, Freiberger Forschungsheft no. D5 (Berlin, 1954); Georg Agricola and seine Zeit (Berlin, 1956); and “Dr. Georgius Agricola and die Begriindung des Bergbaumedizin,” in Jahrbuch des Museums fur Mineralogie and Geologic Dresden, 5 (1959), 112–154.

Helmut M. Wiisdorf