Ore Deposits and Mineralogy

A common belief among alchemists of the 16th and 17th

centuries held that metalliferous deposits were generated
by heat emanating from Earth’s centre but activated
by the heavenly bodies.
The German scientist Georgius Agricola has with
much justification been called the father of mineralogy.
Of his seven geologic books, De natura fossilium (1546;
“On Natural Fossils”) contains his major contributions to
mineralogy and, in fact, has been called the first textbook
on that subject. In Agricola’s time and well into the 19th
century, “fossil” was a term that could be applied to any
object dug from the Earth. Thus Agricola’s classification
of fossils provided pigeonholes for organic remains, such
as ammonites, and for rocks of various kinds in addition to
minerals. Individual kinds of minerals, their associations
and manners of occurrence, are described in detail, many
for the first time.
With the birth of analytical chemistry toward the latter
part of the 18th century, the classification of minerals
on the basis of their composition at last became possible.
The German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner was one
of those who favoured a chemical classification in preference
to a “natural history” classification based on external
appearances. His list of several classifications, published
posthumously, recognized 317 different substances ordered
in four classes.