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In Europe, more than any other part of the world, industrial manufacturing and technology has developed from metallurgy, the mining and smelting of metals. Advances in metallurgy have been at once the cause and effect of European technological superiority. In the Renaissance the extraction and smelting of ore was a strongly traditional industry, and Vanoccio Biringuccio's book De la pirotechnia libri X (Ten Books of a Work in Fire, 1540), like George Agricola's De Re Metallica Libri XII (Twelve Books on Metals, 1556), did not announce any dramatic inventions....
