50 McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING 



because of its complexity, is suborganic, led him to attribute to it 

 characteristics of living organisms. Although flatly denying to water 

 any constitution that would involve a sensory system, he still stoutly 

 maintained that water could and does exercise a preference to be in 

 the liquid phase, and never would he admit that liquid water is more 

 common to human experience than vapor or ice simply because it 

 is the stable phase at ordinary temperatures and pressures. Always, 

 he held, we must push back our inquiries another step into the un- 

 known. Atomistic concepts appealed to him far less than those of 

 the phenomenologist, so that he was less sympathetic in his discus- 

 sions with chemists and physicists than with experts in other lines 

 of philosophic enquiry. 



Great as was McGee's service to science in general, he left but com- 

 paratively little of permanent material value to soil enquiries. Three 

 problems attracted his attention: the conservation of the soil water 

 for the use of crops; the transport of soil material, or soil erosion; 

 and the management of soils, especially the theoretical basis for the 

 practice of mulching. To the last of these problems he gave a great 

 deal of thought, and was convinced himself that the principal func- 

 tion of a mulch is to attract moisture from the air so that it could 

 within the soil pass to the preferred liquid phase and there perform 

 its normal function of aiding plant growth. To the first and second 

 problems, however, he lent yeoman service by pressing them upon 

 public attention, formulating them in terms that would appeal to 

 the imagination; and by lending the weight of his remarkable per- 

 sonality and marvellous diction, forcing their importance upon the 

 consciousness of all thinking men. That the details of his concepts 

 of the mechanism of the water cycle and the life of soils as subor- 

 ganic entities will quickly be forgotten detracts not at all from the 

 debt we owe him, in broadening our vision of the scope of the con- 

 servation ideal to include our greatest material heritage, the soils of 

 the nation, and their most important component, the soil water. 



From Professor Collier Cobb, of the University of North Carolina: 



I never knew a man of such wide and varied interests, or one who 

 possessed more accurate and detailed information about them all, 

 and always in relation to their bearing on human betterment. 



