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Index >> Soil Microbiology >> Beginnings of Soil Science

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Soil Microbiology Origin of Life Origin of Land Plants Beginnings of Agriculture Biosphere Turnover of Carbon Turnover of Nitrogen

Beginnings of Soil Science

	The Beginnings of Soil Science much of the earlier knowledge on soil science in relation to plant growth was either passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the other or was written in books with losse generalization lacking experimental evidences. Plant nutrients were vaguely called as ‘principles’ in rain water, in soil and in plant and animal remains until the French scientists Antoine Lavosier in 1794 and J.B. Boussingault in 1834 and the German chemist Justus Von Liebig in 1840 attempted chemical analysis of plants and soils and air. At Rothamsted in England, John Bennet Lawes in 1840 and his associate J.H. Gilbert in 1842 produced superphosphate by chemical treatment of crushed bones with sulphuric acid. The next major discovery in the field of artificial fertilizers came from the German chemist Fritz
Haber who synthesized ammonia during the First World War. Following these two events, the concept of N, P₂O₅ and K₂O containing fertilizers, as we know today, came to stay. Later, carefully conducted experiments in the present century showed the distinction between major and minor nutrients and their significance in the physiology of plants. Concurrent with these developments, soil was no longer considered as an inert medium thanks to Beijerinck who isolated the nodule forming bacteria from soil during the last century and Azotobacter during the first year of the twentieth century. Since then, intensive research on soil microorganisms has shown that soil is a dynamic medium in which plants and microorganisms coexist and are mutually related in more than one way.
Thus, in retrospect, evolution has progressed from unicellular organisms to land plants over millions of years but strangely, even at the present time, life exists on earth in all diversity and in all stages of development and evolution except that man has intensively domesticated plants and animals for food. Along this long road of evolution, ever since the firs seed of a land plant started germinating, plants must have begun to interact passively with soil microorganisms must have evolved on different lines into symbiosis and parasitism, whose manifestations could be seen even now in the present-day biosphere. Free-living microorganisms in soil which did not directly come into contact with plants also played an indirect role in the well-being of plants

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Beginnings of Soil Science Major Types of Beneficial Interactions Associations Between Plants and Soil Microorganisms Major Microbiological Process in Soil by Free Living Microorganisms Which Indirectly Influence Plant Growth

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