Georgius Agricola

“ When a man owns mines but is ignorant of the art of mining, then it is advisable that he should share in common with others the expenses, not of one only, but of several mines. When one man alone meets the expense for a long time of a whole mine, if good fortune bestows on him a vein abundant in metals, or in other products, he becomes very wealthy ”

“ It is almost our daily experience to learn that, for the sake of obtaining gold and silver, doors are burst open, walls are pierced, wretched travellers are struck down by rapacious and cruel men born to theft, sacrilege, invasion, and robbery. We see thieves seized and strung up before us, sacrilegious persons burnt alive, the limbs of robbers broken on the wheel, wars waged for the same reason, which are not only destructive to those against whom they are waged, but to those also who carry them on. ”

“ The hanging or footwalls of a vein are hard, when composed of rock in which there are few stringers or seams; harder, in which they are fewer; hardest, in which they are fewest or none at all. When these are absent, the rock is quite devoid of water which softens it. But the hardest rock of the hanging or footwall, however, is seldom as hard as the harder class of ore.
Miners dig out crumbling ore with the pick alone. When the metal has not yet shown itself, they do not discriminate between the hangingwall and the veins; when it has once been found, they work with the utmost care. ”

“ Now, before I deal with the methods which must be employed in working, I will speak of the duties of the Mining Prefect, the Bergmeister, the Jurors, the Mining Clerk, the Share Clerk, the manager of the mine or tunnel, the foreman of the mine or tunnel, and the workmen.
To the Mining Prefect, whom the King or Prince appoints as his deputy, all men of all races, ages, and rank, give obedience and submission. He governs and regulates everything at his discretion, ordering those things which are useful and advantageous in mining operations, and prohibiting those which are to the contrary. ”

“ Those who think mining of no advantage to the men who follow the occupation assert, first, that scarcely one in a hundred who dig metals or other such things derive profit therefrom; and again, that miners, because they entrust their certain and well-established wealth to dubious and slippery fortune, generally deceive themselves, and as a result, impoverished by expenses and losses, in the end spend the most bitter and most miserable of lives. But persons who hold these views do not perceive how much a learned and experienced miner differs from one ignorant and unskilled in the art. ”

“ The more shares of which any individual is owner the more profits he takes.
I will now explain how the owners may lose or obtain the right over a mine, or a tunnel, or a share. Formerly, if anyone was able to prove by witnesses that the owners had failed to send miners for three continuous shifts [13] , the Bergmeister deprived them of their right over the mine, and gave the right over it to the informer, if he desired it. But although miners preserve this custom to-day, still mining share owners who have paid their contributions do not lose their right over their mines against their will. ”

“ The miner, after he has selected out of many places one particular spot adapted by Nature for mining, bestows much labour and attention on the veins. These have either been stripped bare of their covering by chance and thus lie exposed to our view, or lying deeply hidden and concealed they are found after close search; the latter is more usual, the former more rarely happens, and both of these occurrences must be explained. There is more than one force which can lay bare the veins unaided by the industry or toil of man ”

“ But if both ends of one vein are being dug out in two tunnels, or drifts from opposite directions, the surveyor first of all considers the lower tunnel or drift and afterward the upper one, and judges how much each of them has risen little by little. On each side strong men take in their hands a stretched cord and hold it so that there is no point where it is not strained tight; on each side the surveyor supports the cord with a rod half a fathom long, and stays the rod at the end with a short stick as often as he thinks it necessary. ”

“ Whether they can do these things or not I cannot decide; but, seeing that so many writers assure us with all earnestness that they have reached that goal for which they aimed, it would seem that faith might be placed in them; yet also seeing that we do not read of any of them ever having become rich by this art, nor do we now see them growing rich, although so many nations everywhere have produced, and are producing, alchemists, and all of them are straining every nerve night and day to the end that they may heap a great quantity of gold and silver, I should say the matter is dubious. ”

“ There is a saying of Socrates, that just as wine is influenced by the cask, so the character of riches is like their possessors.
The Stoics, whose custom it is to argue subtly and acutely, though they did not put wealth in the category of good things, they did not count it amongst the evil ones, but placed it in that class which they term neutral. For to them virtue alone is good, and vice alone evil. The whole of what remains is indifferent. Thus, in their conviction, it matters not whether one be in good health or seriously ill; whether one be handsome or deformed. ”

“ The Bergmeister does not, however, forbid an extraordinary shift when he concedes only one ordinary shift. When it is time to go to work the sound of a great bell, which the foreigners call a “campana,” gives the workmen warning, and when this is heard they run hither and thither through the streets toward the mines. Similarly, the same sound of the bell warns the foreman that a shift has just been finished; therefore as soon as he hears it, he stamps on the woodwork of the shaft and signals the workmen to come out. ”

“ Rock and earth on the one hand, and metal and ore on the other, are filled into buckets separately and drawn up to the open air or to the nearest tunnel. If the shaft is not deep, the buckets are drawn up by a machine turned by men; if it is deep, they are drawn by machines turned by horses.
It often happens that a rush of water or sometimes stagnant air hinders the mining; for this reason miners pay the greatest attention to these matters, just as much as to digging, or they should do so. ”

“ And yet whenever I have inquired into the complaints which are in common vogue, I always find that the owners who are abused have the best of reasons for driving the men from the mines; while those who abuse the owners have no reason to complain about them. Take the case of those who, not having paid their contributions, have lost the right of possession, or those who have been expelled by the magistrate out of another man’s mine: for some wicked men, mining the small veins branching from the veins rich in metal, are wont to invade the property of another person. ”

“ The surveyor, as I said, employs his art when the owners of the mines desire to know how many fathoms of the intervening ground require to be dug; when a tunnel is being driven toward a shaft and does not yet reach it; or when the shaft has not yet been sunk to the depth of the bottom of the tunnel which is under it; or when neither the tunnel reaches to that point, nor has the shaft been sunk to it. It is of importance that miners should know how many fathoms remain from the tunnel to the shaft, or from the shaft to the tunnel, in order to calculate the expenditure ”

“ In very truth, even the works of art, elegant, embellished, elaborate, useful, are fashioned in various shapes by the artist from the metals gold, silver, brass, lead, and iron. How few artists could make anything that is beautiful and perfect without using metals? Even if tools of iron or brass were not used, we could not make tools of wood and stone without the help of metal. ”

“ A small quantity of water is drawn from the shafts by machines of different kinds which men turn or work. If so great a quantity has flowed into one shaft as greatly to impede mining, another shaft is sunk some fathoms distant from the first, and thus in one of them work and labour are carried on without hindrance, and the water is drained into the other, which is sunk lower than the level of the water in the first one; then by these machines or by those worked by horses, the water is drawn up into the drain and flows out of the shaft-house or the mouth of the nearest tunnel. ”

“ The gold and silver mines belonging to the communities of Schemnitz and Cremnitz have been worked for 800 years, and these latter are said to be the most ancient privileges of the inhabitants. Some then say the profit from an individual mine is unstable, as if forsooth, the miner is, or ought to be dependent on only one mine, and as if many men do not bear in common their expenses in mining, or as if one experienced in his art does not dig another vein, if fortune does not amply respond to his prayers in the first case. ”