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Georgius Agricola: Looking Beyond Aristotle and Alchemy
| Article
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12162 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
2,965 Words |
| Author
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William J. McPeak
A graduate of the UCLA Department of Meteorology and a
former USAF weather service meteorologist, William J. McPeak
is a regular member of the American Geophysical Union's
atmospheric section. As an independent historian of science,
he has contributed several articles on the Bjerkneses and the
Bergen meteorologists to Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists
(Gale Research, 1995). |
"We lost, on November 21st [1555], that distinguished ornament of our Fatherland, Georgius Agricola, a man of eminent intellect, of culture and of judgment . . . to a four-days fever." So in part read the letter of Georg Fabricius to the great intellectual and educator Philipp Melanchthon. Both men were Protestants; one was a lifelong friend of Agricola's, the other an admiring correspondent. Fabricius also noted that Agricola, a Catholic dying in the small, predominantly Protestant mining town of Chemnitz in Saxon Germany, had been refused burial in Chemnitz's Cathedral of St. Jacob, formerly Catholic and now Protestant. The tragedy was that Agricola, one of the great intellectuals of Saxon Germany, had been the faithful, ever-selfless mayor of Chemnitz for almost 11 years. With religious feelings running high in that year of the Peace of Augsburg, which would temporarily halt the religious conflict of the Reformation, Agricola was borne nearly 40 miles to the Catholic town of Zeitz and interred in the cathedral there. This incident is the only known case of ill feeling against a man whose life was a celebration of dedication to integrity and the scientific spirit.
Agricola's world
The sixteenth century was a period of global exploration and discovery, of intellectual, political, and religious ferment. It was an era of transition, not just of a rebirth of ancient Greek and Roman culture, as the name Renaissance might suggest. Most important, the century strove to provide a clearinghouse of human thought and endeavor, in part through the printing process inaugurated by Johannes Gutenburg circa 1450.
The natural world was still generally viewed in accordance with the ideas of the ancient Greeks. Though sometimes scrutinized critically in the Middle Ages, the thought of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) continued to provide the foundation of the natural sciences. Aristotelianism systemized the physical world, but the system it imposed was challenged by discrepancies observed and recorded. The best scientific minds of the Renaissance collected everything from plants and rocks to sightings of rainbows and comets. They dabbled in the processes of incipient inductive and experimental thinking. Yet Aristotle was spared displacement because no other system rivaled his. Limited attempts at just such a new ordering of nature did appear in Renaissance science. One of these, meant to explain the solid matter of the terrestrial world, was the work of Agricola. It would remain influential for 200 years and be an important step toward the modern chemical interpretation of matter.
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