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Georgius Agricola: Looking Beyond Aristotle and Alchemy
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12162 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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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
... (1996 of 19242 Characters)
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