Georgii Agricolae medici Bermannus, sive de re metallica

Decorative drop cap letter N featuring floral and foliate motifs.

No others, by Hercules, most distinguished man, seem to me to deserve better of the human race than those who transmit to posterity, through letters, either the arts or the secrets of nature discovered by themselves or others. Even though we men are endowed with a certain power of reason, cognition, and science, by which we excel even the mute beasts and are capable not only of virtues and various arts and disciplines but are even inventors of them, and indeed are able to penetrate into the most abstruse things of nature, it is necessary that the knowledge of any man, even the most skillful, be very narrow if it is confined within the limits of human life, which is very short, and no one will know more than what he himself has discovered. Whence it happens that we are rightly indignant at some men of previous centuries who, through their own laziness and negligence, I know not whether they have lost, but certainly have allowed to perish, the things discovered and committed to writing by the labor of so many supreme and learned men.