Mines were believed to regrow their ores, sustaining regenerative-earth imagery into the 1700s
Evidence
Once the veins of ore were mined, it was believed that new ore grew again within a few years. Diamond mines in the East Indies were filled with new diamonds; sulfur mines were soon replenished. Iron ore continued to grow in the mines of Elba off the coast of Italy; the iron ore fields of Saga in Germany refilled within ten years. Silver twigs resembling plants grew in the shafts of abandoned mines in the Joachim Valley. In his Art of Metals (1640), Albaro Barba, director of the Potosi mines in the Spanish West Indies, wrote, “All of us know that in the rich hill at Potosi the stones, which divers years we have left behind us, thinking there was not plate enough in them to make it worth our labor, we now bring home and find abundant plate in them, which can be attributed to nothing but the perpetual generation of silver.” The image of Mother Earth and her generative role in the production of metals continued to be significant well into the eighteenth century. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 168
Categorization
- DEFINE: Concrete examples of how the concept of a regenerative living earth was held as practical belief, not metaphor.
- QUESTION: When exactly did this regeneration belief collapse in favor of the view of ores as finite chemical deposits?
- XREF: connects to: Premodern thinkers believed metals grew underground like living plants from seeds — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 165; The womb analogy was the dominant metaphor for earth’s mineral generation — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 143
Broader Connections
- Premodern thinkers believed metals grew underground like living plants from seeds
#corroborates(1.00) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 165 - The womb analogy was the dominant metaphor for earth’s mineral generation
#expands(0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 143