Excerpt from Out West, Vol. 20: A Magazine of the Old Pacific and the New; January 1904

The Encyclopedia Britannica, on what authority I do not know, states that the work was printed in Basle in 1546. The copy* from which these reproductions are made is dated 1561, six years after Agricola's death. That it is a second edition, is indicated by the title-page reference to the archetypus. But, the dedication by Agricola to the Duke Of Saxony is dated MDL (1550) and the poem to Agricola - following a frequent custom, in those scholarly days, of including laudatory verses to the author by distinguished hands - is dated 1551. The colophon shows that the book was printed in Basle, in the Froben Office, by Hieronymus Frobenius and Nicholas Episco pius, in the month Of March, in the Year Of our Lord MDLXI.

Georgius Agricola, otherwise Georg Bauer (and originally, it is said, Landmann), was the Father Of Mineralogy. He was the first man to raise it to the dignity of a science. That he was, everything considered, the greatest mineralogist in history, need not be argued. The authentic fact that he not only over shadowed all predecessors ih a study then already years Old, but so projected himself upon the future that the mineral ogists Of the world, all and several, did not seriously improve upon him in the next 200 years, save in one vital point - the Patio Process, invented by Bartolomé de Medina in Mexico in 1557 - may stand for that. It was not till about 1750 that mineralogy made any important advance beyond the standpoint Of Agricola. And to this day the magnum opus Of that ancient who had learned to walk when Columbus sailed, and had grown to man's stature when Columbus died, is the corner-stone Of every mineralogist and mining engineer who Knows his Busi ness from the ground up.

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