Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
To the geologist the soil is an inconvenient mantle hiding the more important material which he wishes to study. Even the drift geologist, who is more particularly interested in superficial deposits, generally dismisses the soil as lying above his zone of interest. Yet the processes which go on in the soil horizons have an importance apart from their significance in practical agriculture. The study of soils has, perhaps, suffered from its close relationship to practical affairs, for it has naturally been left to the agricultural chemist, who has been obliged to approach it with an applied bias. We have in our own country scarcely any research in which the material is treated from a purely scientific point of view and studied in the same way as rocks have been studied by geologists.
The writer ventures to hope that this convenient term (Gr. πéδov = soil or earth) will be more generally used to describe the scientific study of soils. There seems to be no satisfactory alternative.