Excerpt from The Soil: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of the Growth of Crops

The study of the soil, which is fundamental in any application of science to that part of agriculture which deals with the growth of crops, has received greatly increased attention during the past few years. The crude chemical point of view, which in the main regarded the soil as a nutritive medium for the plant, has been altogether extended, by a consideration of the soil as the seat of a number of physical processes affecting the supply of heat and of air and water to the plant, and again as a complex laboratory, peopled by many types of lower organisms, whose function is in some cases indispensable, in others noxious, to the higher plants with which the farmer is concerned. These three kinds of reaction - chemical, physical, and biological - interact upon one another and upon the crop in many ways; they are affected by, and serve to explain, the various tillage operations which have been learnt by the accumulated experience of the farming community, and the hope for future progress lies in the further adaptation for practical ends of these processes at work in the soil.

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