Abstract
BY the death on Nov. 11, at the age of sixty seven years, of Milton Whitney, soil science loses one of its most striking and original personalities. His work extended over nearly forty years, and throughout the whole period he was noted for the freshness of his outlook and the novelty of his deas. He first came into prominence in 1892, when, as professor of geology and soil physics at the Maryland Agricultural College and physicist to the Experiment Station, he published an interesting paper, “Some Physical Properties of Soils in Relation to Moisture and Crop Distribution,” in which he examined a number of soils of known productiveness and showed that their agricultural properties are closely related to the texture of the soil as revealed by mechanical analysis. The physical properties of the soil, especially the texture, regulate its temperature, moisture content, and air supply, or, as he called it, with the love of analogy which characterised all his writings, the ‘climate’ of the soil, and he argued that the significance of these physical properties in determining the distribution and yield of crops must therefore be of the same order as that of climate in the ordinary sense of the word. In short, these physical factors are the predominant factors in soil fertility. He thus broke completely away from the idea currently accepted at that time that fertility is mainly a matter of chemical composition of the soil. The American workers were prepared for this insistence on the physical properties, as W. H. King had already at Madison been carrying on important physical studies, and there were no active soil investigators in Great Britain to controvert the position even if they had wished to do so.
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RUSSELL, E. Prof. Milton Whitney. Nature 121, 27 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121027a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121027a0