The other works of Agricola are his treatise De Natura Fossilium, in ten books; De Ortu et Causis Subterraneorum, in five books; De Natura eorum quæ effluunt ex Terra, in four books; De veteribus et novis Metallis, in two books; and his Bermannus sive de re metallica Dialogus. The treatise De veteribus et novis Metallis is amusing. He not only collects together all the historical facts on record, respecting the first discoverers of the different metals and the first workers of mines, but he gives many amusing anecdotes nowhere else to be found, respecting the way in which some of the most celebrated German mines were discovered. In the second book he takes a geographical view of every part of the known world, and states the mines wrought and the metals found in each. We must not suppose that all his statements in this historical sketch are accurate: to admit it would be to allow him a greater share of information than could possibly belong to any one man. He frequently gives us the authority upon which his statements are founded; but he often makes statements without any authority whatever. Thus he says, that a mine of quicksilver had been recently discovered in Scotland: the fact however, is, that no quicksilver-mine ever existed in any part of Britain. There was, indeed, a foolish story circulated about thirty years ago, about a vein of quicksilver found under the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed; but it was an assertion unsupported by any authentic evidence.
Many years elapsed before much addition was made to the processes described by Agricola. In the year 1566, Pedro Fernandes de Velasco introduced a method of extracting gold and silver from their ores in Mexico and Peru by means of quicksilver. But I have never seen a description of his process. Alonzo Barba claims for himself, and seemingly with justice, the method of amalgamating the ores of gold and silver by boiling. Barba was a Spanish priest, who lived about the year 1609, at Tarabuco, a market-town in the province of Charcso, eight miles from Plata, in South America. In the year 1615 he was curate at Tiaguacano, in the Province of Pacayes, and in 1617, he lived at Lepas in Peru. He is said to have been a native of Lepe, a small township in Andalusia, and had for many years the living of the church of St. Bernard at Potosi. His work on the amalgamation of gold and silver ores appeared at Madrid in the year 1640, in quarto.[174] In the year 1629 a new edition of it appeared with an appendix, under the title of “Trattado de las Antiquas Minas de España de Alonzo Carillo Lasso.” The English minister at the Court of Madrid, the Earl of Sandwich, published the first part of it in an English translation at London, in 1674, under the title of “The First Book of the Art of Metals, in which is declared the manner of their generation, and the concomitants of them, written in Spanish by Albaro Alonzo Barba. By E. Earl of Sandwich.”
The next improver of metallurgic processes was Lazarus Erckern, who was upper bar-master at Kuttenberg, in the year 1588, and was superintendent of the mines in Germany, Hungary, Transylvania, the Tyrol, &c., to three successive emperors. His work has been translated into English under the title of “Heta Minor; or the laws of art and nature in knowing, judging, assaying, fining, refining, and enlarging the bodies of confined metals. To which are added essays on metallic words, illustrated with sculptures. By Sir J. Pettus. London, 1683, folio.” But this translation is a very bad one. Erckern gives a plain account of all the processes employed in his time without a word of theory or reasoning. It is an excellent practical book; though it is obvious enough that the author was inferior in point of abilities to Agricola. His treatment of Don Juan de Corduba, who offered, in 1588, to put the Court of Vienna in possession of the Spanish method of extracting gold and silver from the ores by amalgamation, as related by Baron Born in his work on amalgamation, shows very clearly that Erckern was a very illiberal-minded man, and puffed up with an undue conceit of his own superior knowledge.[175] Had he condescended to assist the Spaniard, and to furnish him with proper materials to work upon, the Austrians might have been in possession of the process of amalgamation with all its advantages a couple of centuries before its actual introduction.
I need not take any notice of the docimastic treatises of Schindlers and Schlutter, which are of a much later date, and both of which have been translated into French, the former by Geoffroy, junior; the latter by Hellot. This last translation, in two large quartos, published in 1764, constitutes a very valuable book, and exhibits all the docimastic and metallurgic processes known at that period with much fidelity and minuteness. Very great improvements have taken place since that period, but I am not aware of any work published in any of the European languages, that is calculated to give us an exact idea of the present state of the various mining and metallurgic processes—important as they are to civilized society.
Gellert’s Metallurgic Chemistry, so far as it goes, is an excellent book.
CHAPTER VII.
OF GLAUBER, LEMERY, AND SOME OTHER CHEMISTS OF THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Hitherto I have treated of the alchymists, or iatro-chemists, and have brought the history of chemistry down to the beginning of the eighteenth century. But during the seventeenth century there existed several laborious chemists, who contributed very materially by their exertions, either to extend the bounds of the science, or to increase its popularity and respectability in the eyes of the world. Of some of the most eminent of these it is my intention to give an account in this chapter.
Of John Rudolf Glauber, the first of these meritorious men in point of time, I know very few particulars. He was a German and a medical man, and spent most of his time at Salzburg, Ritzingen, Frankfort on the Maine, and at Cologne. Towards the end of his life he went to Holland, but during the greatest part of his residence in that country he was confined to a sick-bed. He died at Amsterdam in 1668, after having reached a very advanced age. Like Paracelsus, whom he held in high estimation, he was in open hostility with the Galenical physicians of his time. This led him into various controversies, and induced him to publish various apologies; most of which still remain among his writings. One of the most curious of these apologies is the one against Farmer. To this man Glauber had communicated certain secrets of his own, which were at that time considered as of great value; Farrner binding himself not to communicate them to any person. This obligation he not only broke, but publicly deprecated the skill and integrity of Glauber, and offered to communicate to others, for stipulated sums, a set of secrets of his own, which he vaunted of as particularly valuable. Glauber examines these secrets, and shows that every one of them possessed of any value, had been communicated by himself to Farrner, and to put an end to Farrner’s unfair attempt to make money by selling Glauber’s secrets, he in this apology communicates the whole processes to the public.
Glauber’s works were published in Amsterdam, partly in Latin, and partly in the German language. In the year 1689 an English translation of them was published in London by Mr. Christopher Packe, in one large folio volume. Glauber was an alchymist and a believer in the universal medicine. But he did not confine his researches to these two particulars, but endeavoured to improve medicine and the arts by the application of chemical processes to them. In his treatise of philosophical furnaces he does not confine himself to a description of the method of constructing furnaces, and explaining the use of them, but gives an account of a vast many processes, and medicinal and chemical preparations, which he made by means of these furnaces. One of the most important of these preparations was muriatic acid, which he obtained by distilling a mixture of common salt, sulphate of iron, and alum, in one of the furnaces which he describes.