THE ELEGY OF ADAM SIBER TO VALENTIN HERTEL, CONCERNING THE BOOKS OF GEORGIUS AGRICOLA.

We, the unlearned and the learned alike, write books everywhere, and the burning desire for a name drives us all. One teaches the causes of things, another seeks from the Socratic fountain the method by which life should be governed. One transmits the laws of Palaemon and the precepts of speech, another the art of Zeno. It pleases many to walk through the wide fields of eloquence and to paint words with more than one flower. Many tell of the ancients, lacking no light, and many wish to have a name through histories. There is one who believes he can surpass Thamyris and Orpheus in song, and desires to be noble through that. Another treats numbers, another the stars, and thinks himself an old man of Syracuse referring to Archimedes in his art. In short, there are not as many mushrooms when the earth releases them in the warming spring on mountains and in woods, as there is a multitude of writers presenting themselves at this time, with everything full of new pages. Yet, Hertel, how does it happen that the glory of fame which they sought does not happen equally to everyone? How does it happen that, while seeing the deaths of praise, the greatest crowd is often surpassed by its own books? Is it because they only transcribe the famous discoveries which the ancients produced with their own genius, generating nothing from themselves that future centuries or a mindful posterity might care to know? Or is it because they are not accustomed to calling words to the judgment of the file meaning: they do not revise or polish their work, nor to remove those worthy of being lined out, so that they might bear the test of time and thereby have a more certain name, and a greater one from the final hand? No, no, Hertel, it is not enough to have written books and to have our names read on the front page. That glory may lift you aloft like the earth, so that you are counted among the men who are not disdained, the writing itself must not lack genius—far from it—which every author can give to his own work, if care and clear order are added, along with words worthy of the Latin sound. Because these are all present in the books of our Agricola, in which he gathers the history of nature, and through his learning he ensures that ancient antiquity does not crush our centuries with the praises of its genius.

He commands everything that the parent earth contains in her pregnant womb to have light from the darkness. He explains why rivers remain in eternal veins, what the causes are of boiling water, and what those of tepid water. Why the wave of the Styx kills, why the royal water of Choaspes becomes sweet, and why the Anigrus pours out foul-smelling waters. He reveals the cause of why Aetna glows with the fires of Enceladus, or why it has bitumen beneath it as a flame. Why it shakes the high peaks of Pindus, and why it turns the rapid waters from the sea back into its source. He details how many species of earth there are, and what use each remarkable soil found in its own ground provides. What salt is, what niter is, and what that Colchian substance was that burned, by which the new bride was once deceived by the wiles of Aeson’s son referring to Medea's poisoned gift to Glauce. Whether amber erupts from rich veins in the earth, or if it is made from your tears, Phaethusa. What iron creates, what creates the diamond that conquers flame, and what creates Parian marble and hard rocks. In short, why love compels men to search for hidden veins by probing the bowels of the earth. What seeds are suitable for producing metals, and what substance forms them in their own fibers. How many mixtures of nature, in her playful power, joins in one body, and how many ways and in what manners. These were not investigated by the wits of the ancients, nor were they known to you, Theophrastus. Even these things (let it be permitted to confess the manifest) were not known to your old man of Stagyra Aristotle; nor to ours Pliny the Elder, although he embraces the whole world, plucking every kind of author. Will the fame of such clear labor not be on the lips of men, doomed to perish before its day? Rather, it will exist as long as the earth pours forth wandering rivers, as long as there is air, as long as there is fire. As long as the riches growing in the depths of the earth, whose natures he examines, are dug up, he will be famous, and his name will be read in the whole world, O Teutonic land, ornament of yours. Whoever writes with care what is useful to studies remains; the rest of the crowd of authors perishes.