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teaching children of rich parents. He participated at the carousels of his rich stu-
dents, and he liked this style of life without doubts, qualms, and worries. When his
supervising university professor asked him how he was proceeding with the doctor-
ate dissertation, Dokuchaev answered truthfully that it was slow because he did not
have enough time.
“Why? Do you have fi nancial troubles?” asked the professor, thinking how to
help his talented student. Dokuchaev was not only gifted, but also he had good luck.
During his early university studies, he discovered a mammoth skeleton in some
alluvial sediments while on a university excursion. Even scientifi c research is diffi -
cult to perform without good luck.
Dokuchaev answered the professor's question, “I am attending rave-ups and
drinking parties. They don't leave me enough free time for research.”
“Give up all your studies. You are lost and unfi t for science,” said the completely
upset old professor.
Dokuchaev did not give up. He worked hard and he had the special gift to observe
and to describe what the others missed in one way or another. All of his observations
and data collections were based upon solid foundations of the sciences known at
that time. He combined stubborn fi eld studies with moments of good luck as well as
bad luck, and fi nally he became famous just by his completely new ideas on how to
defi ne and describe soil. His name has been frequently quoted up to now all over the
world, while that of his old, antagonizing professor disappeared in the dust of
archives.
Dokuchaev's fi rst publications were devoted to fi eld studies about the genesis of
riverbeds and of alluvia around them in Central and Northern Russia. Further on, he
wrote about the genesis of loessial wind sediments as well as for the fi rst time the
discovery of the zonal extension of a particular type of soil - the chernozem. He
borrowed the name from the popular Russian chernij meaning black and zem mean-
ing soil. With the soil obtaining its name from the black A horizon, rich in decaying
remnants of steppe vegetation, its name in the newly developing soil science became
very popular to denote a fertile steppe soil. After seven years of intensive fi eld and
laboratory work, Dokuchaev published the topic Russian Chernozem (1883). Here,
we emphasize that he had a lot of help from a team of cooperators under his supervi-
sion. Together they described the parent material and natural vegetation when the
site was not a fi eld and covered with more or less untouched natural vegetation. The
slope of the terrain was also measured, and meteorological data were taken either
from a nearby existing station or from measurements started just at the location
where the access soil probe was dug out. Samples were taken from the horizons and
analyzed physically and chemically at the contemporary levels of accuracy and
technical equipment. It was the fi rst time that an entire soil profi le down to the depth
of parent material was studied in the fi eld and the observed results accompanied by
those obtained in the laboratory. The fi nal evaluation of the soil was considered as
the result of parallel acting factors: parent rock, vegetation, geomorphology, and
climate. Since soil evolution depends upon the length of action of these four factors,
time was also included as a soil-forming factor. If one or more of the fi rst mentioned
four factors change, soil is also gradually changing. The topic was translated into
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