BERGBUCHLEIN: The Little Book on Ores

BERGBUCHLEIN, the "Little Book on Ores" was the first book on mining ever written, sometime between 1505 - 1518 in Saxony, Germany. Translated into English in 1949 by the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, this charming 16th-century text with its original woodcut illustrations is again available to modern readers. With references to astronomy and alchemy, the book ends on a promise to explain the exciting smelting process, but ends abruptly with the promise un-kept. However, the text was sufficiently authoritative that the scholar Georgius Agricola, often considered to be the father of mining, used selections from BERGBUCHLEIN in his landmark work DE RE METALLICA, published in 1556.