[Pg xxv][1] For Agricola's relations with these princes see p. [ix].
[2] Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella was a Roman, a native of Cadiz, and lived during the 1st Century. He was the author of De Re Rustica in 12 books. It was first printed in 1472, and some fifteen or sixteen editions had been printed before Agricola's death.
[Pg xxvi][3] 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 Theophrastus as president of the Lyceum, 288 B.C.
[5] For note on Theophrastus see [Appendix B].
[6] It appears that the poet Philo did write a work on mining which is not extant. So far as we know the only reference to this work is in Athenæus' (200 A.D.) Deipnosophistae. The passage as it appears in C. D. Yonge's Translation (Bonn's Library, London, 1854, Vol. II, 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 Experimento is difficult to identify. It seems likely to be the little Probier Büchlein, numbers of which were published in German in the first half of the 16th Century. We discuss this work at some length in the [Appendix B] on Ancient Authors.
[8] Pandulfus, "the Englishman," is mentioned by various 15th and 16th Century writers, 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 to a work by Pandulfus on veins and minerals. We have not been able to find the book.
[Pg xxvii][9] Jacobi (Der Mineralog Georgius Agricola, Zwickau, 1881, p. 47) says: "Calbus Freibergius, so called by Agricola himself, is certainly no other than the Freiberg Doctor Rühlein von Kalbe; he was, according to Möller, a doctor and burgomaster at Freiberg at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th Centuries.... The chronicler describes him as a fine mathematician, who helped to survey and design the mining towns of Annaberg in 1497 and Marienberg in 1521." We would call attention to the statement of Calbus' views, quoted at the end of Book III, De Re Metallica (p. [75]), which are astonishingly similar to statements in the Nützlich Bergbüchlin, and leave little doubt that this "Calbus" was the author of that anonymous book on veins. For further discussion see [Appendix B].
[10] For discussion of Biringuccio see [Appendix B]. The proper title is De La Pirotechnia (Venice, 1540).