TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE.

There are three objectives in translating works of this character: to provide a faithful, literal translation of the author’s statements; to present them in a way that interests the reader; and to preserve, as far as possible, the style of the original text. The task has been doubly difficult in this work because, by using Latin, the author employed a medium that had stopped evolving a thousand years before his subject had even begun to develop in many particulars. Consequently, he struggled with a large number of ideas for which there were no corresponding words in his vocabulary. Instead of adopting his native German terms into the text, he coined several hundred Latin expressions to meet his needs. It is upon this rock that most former attempts at translation have been wrecked.

Except for a very small number, we believe we have been able to discover the intended meaning of such expressions through a study of the context, assisted by a very incomplete glossary prepared by the author himself, and by an exhaustive investigation into the literature of these subjects during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That discovery in this particular was only gradual and obtained after much labor may be indicated by the fact that the entire text has been re-typed three times since the original, and some parts even more often; furthermore, the printer’s proof has been revised three times. We have found an English equivalent—more or less satisfactory—for practically all such terms, except those relating to weights, the varieties of veins, and a few minerals. Regarding weights, we have retained the original Latin because it is impossible to provide true equivalents while avoiding complicated fractional reductions. Moreover, as explained in the Appendix on Weights, it is often impossible to determine exactly what scale the author had in mind.

The English nomenclature to be adopted presented great difficulty for various reasons. Among these were the facts that many methods and processes described have never been practiced in English-speaking mining communities and thus had no equivalent in our vocabulary, and we considered the introduction of German terms undesirable. Other methods and processes have become obsolete along with their descriptive terms, yet we wished to avoid introducing obsolete or unusual English. Most important of all was the necessity to strictly avoid such modern technical terms as would imply a greater scientific understanding than the period possessed.

Agricola’s Latin, while mostly free from medieval corruption, is somewhat tainted by German sentence construction. Moreover, some portions do not...