Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/17

Rh attempt to give a sober, sensible and intelligent description of the technical chemistry within his knowledge. It is interesting also because it preceded the greater work of Agricola by about sixteen years and is mentioned by the latter as having been in his hands, though it contained little that was of use to him.

While Biringuccio is known only through his one book, the works of Agricola are more numerous. They are chiefly upon minerology, mining or geology. He began publishing about 1530, but his great work, "De re Metallic," appeared in 1556. Agricola was a man of university training, and a scholar of fine type. He had studied in Italy and was a physician by profession. He was city physician at Joachimsthal in Bohemia, and later at Chemnitz in Saxony. His location in these mining centers gave him ample opportunity to become interested in mining and mineralogy and in the chemical operations used in metallurgy and assaying. The great work above referred to is for the time a very remarkably clear description of the operations of mining, smelting and assaying, with very complete description of the chemistry of these arts as known to the miners of the time and region. He does not claim apparently to have contributed original work to these arts, but the work of Agricola may justly be considered as the first really great work in the line of the scientific presentation of a chemical industry, a worthy pioneer to the many great technical works which have since appeared in so many lines of chemical industry. Its influence in its own field was immediate, as shown by the later editions called for and even still more by the number of similar though less important treatises which followed its appearance.

Bernard Palissy was a man of much less scholarship than Agricola. What he lacked in that respect he compensated for in an unconquerable enthusiasm in experimentation in the field which most interested him—the making of pottery and its glazes and enamels. He was a real investigator in his field, and his published works describe his experiments and discuss them clearly with neither the dogmatism nor the mystical jargon that most chemical writings of the previous centuries, or even of the subsequent century, exhibit. His works published between 1557 and 1580 may be said to have done much the same for the arts of the potter that the work of Agricola did for mining and the chemistry of metallurgy, with the difference that Palissy's work was rather a presentation of the result of his own labors than a complete compendium of existing knowledge and practise as was the "De re Metallica."

It can not be claimed either for Agricola or for Palissy that they were free from the prevalent superstitions or mystical ideas that were almost universally entertained in their century—but it can be asserted that they kept their constructive labor and thought free from obstruction from such notions. Both repudiated the transmutation ideas of the alchemists as vain and profitless, and both endeavored to make their