Development of Soil Survey 69 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOIL SURVEY. 



T. M. Bushnell, Purdue University. 



The ancients believed in the elemental nature of earth, air, fire 

 and water. This simple concept has been replaced by complex, modern 

 science, yet to the average person, soil is simply "dirt". Simple, 

 contrasting adjectives such as "good or bad, wet or dry, hard or soft, 

 sand or clay, and black, white, red or yellow" are commonly used and 

 seem sufficient. Men may agree that soil is a simple subject until they 

 have some examples before them and find they can not agree as to what 

 is "black" or "clay" or even say what the soil is. 



Before attempting any sort of definition of the soil, mention will 

 be made of the beginnings and growth of the Soil Survey idea. Stu- 

 dents of ancient history find references to soil studies which might be 

 considered the germs of the idea. However, when the modern period 

 of the study of nature arrived, soil science, as such, seems to have been 

 neglected. Apparently no great scientist worked in this field so in- 

 tensively as in other branches of study, and much soil knowledge came 

 as by-products of botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, geology, etc. 

 Perhaps this neglect resulted because the agriculture on soils of the 

 civilized world was the outgrowth of centuries of use, and this use 

 had greatly modified the natural soils. Many soil studies have been 

 designed to learn how to increase crop yields, rather than to learn to 

 know the soil itself. Numerous physical and chemical studies have been 

 made — not of the soil — but of soil materials, disturbed and mixed, often 

 without knowing what soil or what portion of a soil was being in- 

 vestigated. The results were little more informing about the actual 

 soils than the analyses of odd bits of animals would be. The need of 

 knowing the "kinds of soils", and of having a strictly scientific taxonomy 

 of soils was gradually recognized. One of the earliest forms of classi- 

 fication was based on the natural vegetation of the land and gave rise 

 to such terms as "prairie", "walnut", or "piny woods" lands. 



Probably the most extensive and best system of soil classification 

 until recent years, was an outgrowth of geology, and took into con- 

 sideration physiography, drainage, lithological nature of the soil-forming 

 materials, and some of the processes by which they were accumulated. 

 Thus we use such expressions as "upland or bottom", "limestone or 

 sandstone", and "glacial or residual" soils. While these factors are all 

 of importance, especially in connection with the geographical distribu- 

 tion of soils, this mode of attack failed to get at the fundamental re- 

 lationships of soils. 



Dr. C. F. Marbut, of the U. S. Bureau of Soils, stated in 1921 

 that there was "a complete lack throughout the world, until less than 

 40 years ago, of a knowledge of the real characteristics of soils, and 

 the lack of this knowledge in this country until less than 20 years ago". 

 European scientists, especially those in Russia, are credited with the 

 first understanding of soils. A soil map of European Russia, pub- 

 lished in 1901, embodied some of the earliest soil survey work of the 



"Proc. Ind. Acad. Sci., vol. 33, 1923 (1924)." 



