The depiction of soil profiles since the late 1700s

a r t i c l e i n f o Artists have depicted soils in paintings since medieval times, and most landscape and soil paintings were made in the eighteenth century. The systematic study of soils started later and soil science was dominated by agricultural chemistry for most of the nineteenth century. Since the late 1800s soil profile drawings, paintings and photographs have been depicted in hundreds of textbooks. This paper traces the depiction of soil profiles in the scientific literature from the late 1700. The first soil profile depictions were simple diagrams illustrating different layers and soil processes. Photographs started to appear in textbooks at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1950s, several books contained water paintings and from the 1970s onwards textbooks had colour photographs. Soil profile depictions were merely used to illustrate different orders in a classification system. Since the 1990s, efforts have been made to depict the soil profile in 3D. The overall trends and pattern found in this analysis not only reflect the technical ability to depict soils (e.g. camera, printing techniques) but also reflect the state of knowledge on the key properties and processes that have formed a soil. In meiner Blindheit glaubte ich, daß in der erstaunlichen Kette der Naturgesetze, die das Leben auf der Erde regieren und ständig erneuern, ein Bindeglied vergessen worden war. Es schien mir, daß der schwache und unbedeutende Mensch dieses Versehen wieder gut machen müsse. The origin, structure and composition of the earth have fascinated humans all over the world and in all times. It is also at the heart of most religions. Religious beliefs on the earth were slowly overtaken by the systematic and scientific study of the earth that started somewhere in the 1700s. Initially, biblical stories were interwoven with new systematics and terms like diluvium (deposited during le deluge) were part of the early earth science studies. The mining industry encouraged a more systematic study of the earth and geology was more or less born at the beginning of the nineteenth century with C. Lyell (1797–1875) as the leading geologist of his day. The founder of biology, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), studied under Lyell. Both Lyell and Darwin brought systematics and order to the chaos and took out the religious angle that was dominating the thinking of many scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The scientific study of soils started some 50 …