It is our pleasure to acknowledge our obligations to Professor H. R. Fairclough, of Stanford University, for perusal of and suggestions upon the first chapter; and to those whom we have engaged from time to time for one service or another, chiefly bibliographical work and collateral translation. We are also sensibly obligated to the printers, Messrs. Frost & Sons, for their patience and interest, and for their willingness to bend some of the canons of modern printing, to meet the demands of the 16th Century.
July 1, 1912.
The Red House,
Hornton Street, London.
INTRODUCTION.
BIOGRAPHY.[1]
eorgius Agricola was born at Glauchau, in Saxony, on March 24th, 1494, and therefore entered the world when it was still upon the threshold of the Renaissance; Gutenberg's first book had been printed but forty years before; the Humanists had but begun that stimulating criticism which awoke the Reformation; Erasmus, of Rotterdam, who was subsequently to become Agricola's friend and patron, was just completing his student days. The Reformation itself was yet to come, but it was not long delayed, for Luther was born the year before Agricola, and through him Agricola's homeland became the cradle of the great movement; nor did Agricola escape being drawn into the conflict. Italy, already awake with the new classical revival, was still a busy workshop of antiquarian research, translation, study, and publication, and through her the Greek and Latin Classics were only now available for wide distribution. Students from the rest of Europe, among them at a later time Agricola himself, flocked to the Italian Universities, and on their return infected their native cities with the newly-awakened learning. At Agricola's birth Columbus had just returned from his great discovery, and it was only three years later that Vasco Da Gama rounded Cape Good Hope. Thus these two foremost explorers had only initiated that greatest period of geographical expansion in the world's history. A few dates will recall how far this exploration extended during Agricola's lifetime. Balboa first saw the Pacific in 1513; Cortes entered the City of Mexico in 1520; Magellan entered the Pacific in the same year; Pizarro penetrated into Peru in 1528; De Soto landed in Florida in 1539, and Potosi was discovered in 1546. Omitting the sporadic settlement on the St. Lawrence by Cartier in 1541, the settlement of North America did not begin for a quarter of a century after Agricola's death. Thus the revival of learning, with its train of Humanism, the Reformation, its stimulation of exploration and the re-awakening of the arts and sciences, was still in its infancy with Agricola.
We know practically nothing of Agricola's antecedents or his youth. His real name was Georg Bauer ("peasant"), and it was probably Latinized by his teachers, as was the custom of the time. His own brother, in receipts preserved in the archives of the Zwickau Town Council, calls himself "Bauer," and in them refers to his brother "Agricola." He entered the University of Leipsic at the age of twenty, and after about three and one-half years' attendance there gained the degree of Baccalaureus Artium. In 1518 he became Vice-Principal of the Municipal School at Zwickau, where he taught Greek and Latin. In 1520 he became Principal, and among his assistants was Johannes Förster, better known as Luther's collaborator in the translation of the Bible. During this time our author prepared and published a small Latin Grammar[2]. In 1522 he removed to Leipsic to become a lecturer in the University under his friend, Petrus Mosellanus, at whose death in 1524 he went to Italy for the further study of Philosophy, Medicine, and the Natural Sciences. Here he remained for nearly three years, from 1524 to 1526. He visited the Universities of Bologna, Venice, and probably Padua, and at these institutions received his first inspiration to work in the sciences, for in a letter[3] from Leonardus Casibrotius to Erasmus we learn that he was engaged upon a revision of Galen. It was about this time that he made the acquaintance of Erasmus, who had settled at Basel as Editor for Froben's press.