Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12
Soil Reveals Its True Character
12.1
What the Soil's Face Says
“It's a nonsense,” emphatically stated by the serious soil scientist who was famous
for multitudes of papers published under his name as the fi rst author. And as if those
were not enough, there were twice as many additional papers where his name
appeared among the names of coauthors. Jealous gossips used to say that everybody
within this famous scientist's institute was obliged to include his name as a coauthor
of any of their manuscripts.
“It's a nonsense to offer a face to a soil. Although I am aware of the repetitious
expressions of fundamental pedologists that soil is a living body, it is only the
medium for life. Soil can be favorable, but in some instances it is less favorable or
even unfavorable for living organisms,” the famous soil scientist explained to both
of us.
We readily agreed with him. Our concurrence was not just politeness nor was it
our ductility owing to our substantially lower number of publications. It is our
standpoint from which we have evaluated all of our research. This entire topic is our
witness.
We started our discussion with the famous, yet skeptical, soil scientist by argu-
ments eventually supporting our sentence about soil's face. Here, we explain why
we use the word face. Ages ago, people were grouped according to features of the
face. If somebody had great irregularities in his face, he was considered as danger-
ous for his pack or tribe, and when the tribe started to be called nation, the man with
a disfi gured face was believed to be some sort of disaster or danger for the nation.
This belief was probably the reason why the face of criminals was frequently disfi g-
ured in the prison, even though it may have happened in a fi ght before they were
imprisoned. In those days, scoundrels released from jail hit on a good ploy by keep-
ing the scars hidden under their beard. Nowadays, they pay for plastic surgery. Or
from just another corner, men developing their bodybuilding today believe that
pretty women will prefer them provided that they keep a proud and very masculine
