Reading the Natural World: 'Natural Magic'

Agricola was a sixteenth-century German humanist and natural philosopher. He set out to establish mining and mineralogy as topics worthy of humanist scholarship. In De re metallica he drew on classical texts, particularly Pliny the Elder’s Natural history, and replaced German mining terms with Greek and Latin words. The resulting text was both practical and scholarly, and remained the definitive work on mining until the Industrial Revolution. In this illustration, aqua valens (nitric acid) is distilled and used to separate gold from silver. William Medley, the alchemist who defrauded Smith, claimed that he could draw copper from iron by using the same technique. That Smith mainly annotated those passages that relate to the separation of metals using acids betrays of his obsession with this idea.

Author: Agricola
Title: De re metallica [On the nature of metals] (Basel, 1561)
Shelfmark: D.1.3 (catalogue record)

D.1.3