Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) is well known for his geological publications, especial-ly his masterpiece, De Re Metallica (1556), over 500 pages of text illustrated withmore than 250 beautiful and instructive woodcuts. Historians of medicines also havestudied him for his work on disease. But in 1549, he published a short treatise on ani-mals known to exist in the subsurface. This essay is a compendium of what Greek,Latin, and medieval authorities wrote about these animals, but, unlike many of hiscontemporaries, Agricola supplemented those writings with his own observations,and he posed questions about the existence of some of the fanciful beasts describedby his forbearers. Of special interest to paleontologists and zoologists is an "index"at the end where Agricola groups animals by their form of locomotion—walking,crawling, swimming, flying, burrowing—as well as the occasional use of binomens,following in the footsteps of several contemporary herbalists. De Animnantibus Sub-terraneis appeared again as an appendix to De Re Metallica, an updated reprint ofthe 1549 work set in a folio format. Curiously, when Lou Henry Hoover and HerbertHoover published their masterful annotated English translation of De Re Metallicain 1912, they did not include the essay on animals. Consequently, it is not well knownto English-speaking scholars, although it was cited by some of Agricola's contempo-raries, including Conrad Gessner. Then why has Agricola been ignored? Agricola'sDe Re Metallica was copiously illustrated, as were the works of Gessner and UlisseAldrovandi. Thus, even those not fluent in Latin could, with some effort, understandthese authors' intentions by reference to the pictures. But not so with Agricola's DeAnimatibus Subterraneis, which was not illustrated. However, neglecting De Animan-tibus Subterraneis makes Agricola too much of a specialist, whereas as a Renaissancescholar his interests spanned many disciplines. To increase the awareness of Agrico-la's essay on subterranean animals among English-speaking zoologists and histori-ans of science, we offer a functional translation of the 1556 version of his work,which represents his final contribution to the field of biology.
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