soil, classification
Soil covers the land like a continuous sheet, but it greatly differs in character and in usefulness to man from region to region, from farm to farm etc... Soil scientists, engineers, geologists, farmers and others have named and classified different kinds of soil. To the geologists the soil was a kind of disintegrated rock, and they classified it only from this aspect. They gave such terms as granite soils, transported soils and residual soils; these terms were used in most parts of Europe, but a group of Russian scientists began to study the soil itself, not as decomposed rock but as a special substance. They found that different kinds of soil at a given place were determine by climate, vegetation, topography, age and geological materia! Using this system of dynamic soil formation, i.1886 V. V. Dokuchaiev gave the first classification of soil as an independent natural body. In the United States, as in Europe, the concepts of geology dominated soil classification until the Russian work became known, the civil engineer understands the term "sail" as the term which includes all the loose or cohesive deposits such as gravels, sands, silits or clays, or any of their mixtures.
