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Acknowledgments
The present book is a revised and translated version of the volume “Zukünftige Medien. Eine Einführung,” published by Springer VS in 2020. The book was realized as part of a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): “Van Gogh TV: Erschliessung, Multimedia-Dokumentation und Analyse ihres Nachlasses” (directors: Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and Prof. Anja Stöffer of the Hochschule Mainz, funding period: 2018–2021). We thank Steven Lindberg for the excellent translation.
Daniela Adscheid, Tilman Baumgärtel, Leila Brehme, Johannes Hardt, Rainer Hörmann, Karoline Kozlowski, Jule Wegen, and Christian Wild von Hohenborn gave us valuable suggestions and provided assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. Anja Löbert and the team of Textworks helped with the corrections. We are also grateful to Max Stossel for granting permission to use Fig. 4.2 “Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk—Words That Move.” All citations from German sources have been translated by the authors and the translator.
5 Future Media: Radical Imagination and “Immutable Futures”
About the Authors
Christoph Ernst is an assistant professor at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Bonn. Main research interests: diagrammatic reasoning and media aesthetics of information visualization; theory of tacit knowledge and digital media, especially interface theory and artifcial intelligence; media theory and media philosophy, especially media and imagination. Selected publications: Diagrammatik-Reader. Grundlegende Texte aus Theorie und Geschichte (ed. with Birgit Schneider & Jan Wöpking), Berlin: De Gruyter 2016, Diagramme zwischen Metapher und Explikation—Studien zur Medien- und Filmästhetik der Diagrammatik, Bielefeld: transcript 2021. Further information: www.christoph-ernst.com
Jens Schröter holds the chair of media studies at the University of Bonn, Department of Media Studies. Director (together with Anja Stöffer, Mainz) of the DFG research project “Van Gogh TV. Critical Edition, Multimedia-Documentation and Analysis of their Estate” (three years) since April 2018. Speaker of the research project (VW Foundation; together with Prof. Dr. Gabriele Gramelsberger; Dr. Stefan Meretz; Dr. Hanno Pahl, and Dr. Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle) “Society after Money—A Simulation” (four years) since 10/2018. Director of the VW Planning Grant “How is Artifcial Intelligence Changing Science?” (Start: 1.5.2020, one year, preparation of main grant); summer 2017: senior fellowship IFK Vienna, Austria. Winter 2018: senior fellowship IKKM Weimar. Summer 2020: fellowship, DFG special research area 1015 “Muße”, Freiburg. Winter 2021/22: fellowship Center for Advanced Internet Studies,
Fig. 2.2 Diagram of the ways to access Piazza virtuale
Fig. 2.3 The studio setup of Piazza virtuale
Fig. 3.1 The radical imagination, according to Castoriadis, drawn by the authors
Fig. 3.2 Forms of the imaginary in Castoriadis, drawn by the authors
Fig. 3.3 The relationship between utopia and ideology according to Flichy (2007a, 10), reconstructed by the authors
Fig. 3.4 Trends in the evolution of the computer according to Weiser and Brown (1997, 76), reconstructed and slightly modifed by the authors
Fig. 4.1 Future gesture-based media in Weiser (1991), fair use, Scientifc American was asked, but said they do not own the rights. Weiser is dead
Fig. 4.2 An imaginary augmented reality smartphone in This Panda Is Dancing (2016). Image credits: “Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk—Words That Move.”
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract The introduction gives an overview of the problem and the structure of the book.
Keywords Introduction • Structure • Content • Book
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. Einstein (1929, 117)
Everything we know about the future is formed by our imagination. The reason for this is simple. The information we have about the future and the control we have over the future is limited (Rescher 1998, 3). When we want to know something about the future, we have to make something absent present. To make the inexistent exist: the imagination does just that. The imagination makes it possible for us to reach beyond a given state and picture things that are (still) absent or inexistent.
The future is real in the sense that it does not not exist but rather not yet (Rescher 1998, 71). What we know about future things and developments is by no means always wrong. In many felds, we can harbor justifed expectations that the future will take shape at least in a way similar to how
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we imagine it. But history also teaches us that the future holds the possibility of a sometimes limited, sometimes drastic “otherness” (Castoriadis 1987, 190). The future always holds unforeseen events. It changes existing relationships and surprises us with the “new.” All knowledge about the future is thus also knowledge about this uncertainty.
In light of these assumptions, inquiry into “media futures” may sound like unfounded speculation. Who can predict what future media will be? In contrast to other aspects of the future that we can know with somewhat greater certainty—for example, the fairly certain course of stars—developments in the area of media technologies are characterized by a much greater degree of uncertainty. Yet this unpredictability represents an opportunity. For even if one cannot say with a great deal of certainty what form future media will take or which media will dominate in the future, it is nevertheless possible to show how future media are imagined. This imagination of future media is the subject of the present book.
Speaking of “future media” means, for us, speaking of the processes of the imagination that are undertaken—setting out from a present—in relation to said future media. This present need not be our present. The historical look back at “past futures” provides us with important insights: just as it is helpful to ask how we imagine future media today, it is important to ask how future media were imagined in the past.
The internet is full of amusing examples of wrong predictions.1 The telephone was seen as a superfuous plaything. Television was considered a technological impossibility or too boring for viewers. Some thought that the computer could never weigh less than a ton and a half, or that no more than 5000 computers would ever be sold. Moreover, it would be absurd to have such devices at home. No one would wear them on their body, either. It was said of the internet that it would collapse and disappear. And competitors said of the iPhone that no one should expect it to be a market success.2
From today’s perspective, we can smirk at these examples. It should also be recognized, however, that under other circumstances these predictions could have turned out to be correct. Even completely misguided predictions can give us valuable insights into the expectations of their era. Not least, these wrong predictions reveal the hurdles to hopes for change: the persistence and constancy of relations that do not change or disappear despite prognoses to the contrary are often underestimated in discourses about the future.
The philosopher Nicholas Rescher therefore reminds us how diffcult it is to predict specifc events (not general trends) on the basis of social processes (Rescher 1998, 63, 90, 2012, 151–2). According to Rescher, there is an “epistemic gap” between the information available in a historical situation for making a prediction and the actual circumstances that lead to a prediction being warranted or unwarranted (Rescher 1998, 58). It is only in rare cases that we have suffcient information to make correct predictions. In the present society, it is fairly certain that there will be scientifc discoveries in the future. Which ones they will be, by contrast, can hardly be predicted (Rescher 1998, 149, 2009, 2012, 150). For that reason, Rescher warns us that whenever we look back at history, we need to take seriously the inscrutability of the future for people at the time.
This epistemic gap is flled by an “amalgamation” of hopes,3 fears, visions, and fantasies that form around new technology.4 This amalgamation is incomparably denser than the small detail of an accurate or misguided prediction. In what follows, we will call it the “imaginary” of a given era. In the form of specifc ideas—so-called imaginaries—about the future that are common in a culture and in a society, the imaginary forms a framework for our concepts of the technological future. This framework is in effect when an “image” of a future media technology is created.
When one speaks of “imagination,” the “imaginary, and of “imaginaries,” it is necessary to dispel from the outset a common misunderstanding. In the reading proposed here, these three terms refer not to a world of appearance, fantasy, illusion, and deception that should be replaced by “true” knowledge. Rather, it is about the assumption that processes of imagination are constitutive of and productive for human knowledge. In connection to arguments of cultural and social theory, we pursue the idea that processes of imagination also occur in large collectives. Imagination, the imaginary, and imaginaries have an essential role in determining what collectives are prepared to or indeed able to imagine at all at a given historical point in time.
That would bring us back to the context of insuffcient knowledge about the future and the imagination. For if the imagination steps in as a framework to give us an understanding of the future, then it should not be overlooked that at that moment it also infuences our actions. The paradox is obvious: at the very moment one believes one knows with certainty something about the future, one behaves in a way that itself has effects on said future. Lurking in the background is the even more profound problem of a tradeoff between the certainty and the originality of a prediction.
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The more certain a prediction is, the less informative it is (see Rescher 1998, 60). Two insights can be derived from this: frst, imaginations of the future are relevant for our actions; they therefore also affect the development of future media technologies. The supercomputer HAL 9000 from the science fction flm 2001: A Space Odyssey (UK/USA 1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick), which controls a spaceship and supervises its mission, was a fctional character. But the way it is designed and presented, the way it interacts with the astronauts, the scope of takes it can perform, the problems that result from its actions fascinated an entire generation of scholars in the feld of artifcial intelligence. HAL 9000 became an ideal (Stork 1997; Ceruzzi 2011, pp. 98–102). Second, imaginations are also knowledge about the future that is relevant for action when they do not refer adequately to the state that will occur at a later point in time. Imaginations even fulfll their epistemic functions independently of whether they tally with the anticipated future “reality.” No one has yet built a HAL 9000. But that is not the crucial thing. The point is rather that HAL 9000, as an object conveyed through science fction, concretized for us a set of ideas. As a whole this offers a not unambiguous but nevertheless suffciently dense network of semantic elements that permit us to develop an “idea” of artifcial intelligence. We will call such consolidations “fascination cores” (Glaubitz et al. 2011).
In the frst part of the book, we present, using the example of the process of media change, how one can think about the question of future media from the perspective of media studies. In the second part of the book, we go into greater depth by discussing infuential ideas from the felds of media theory, science and technology studies, (critical) future studies, philosophy, and social theory. Finally, in the third part, four examples are analyzed that make it possible to grasp the described processes of imaging future media from the perspective of media studies.
Usually, the line between an introduction and a scholarly achievement runs where either “merely” a summarizing overview of a feld is offered or a thematic feld is opened up in a new way. The present introduction does not ft into that schema. In some cases, it is a compilation of that which is known, from the perspective of media studies; in other cases, however, it goes into more detail about authors and contexts that are more marginal in the feld. The intention for the book is to provide an introduction to the concepts of the subject and to make further research possible. Seen in this way, this introduction could be termed “research-oriented.”
Other introductory works also discuss the connection between future and digital media, such as, to name just one of many other examples, Nick Montfort’s The Future (Montfort 2017, esp. 77–107).5 But the present book has a different focus. We go into the question of “knowledge about the future” only as far as it helps us to explain processes of the imagination with respect to media. Our concern is therefore not an autonomous contribution to future studies but rather the role of knowledge about the future in imagining digital media. The focus is thus on imaginations of new media technologies, not the future. The future nevertheless remains a central subject of processes of the imagination.
Notes
1. For this reason, Nicolas Pethes (2003) has fundamentally questioned the possibility of “prediction.” Instead, many possible prognoses are made, one of which sometimes happens to turn out to be correct in retrospect.
2. All of these predictions were collected at freeCodeCamp (2017).
3. We have deliberately chosen a metaphor here that refers to fuids and alloys and not a formulation such as “texture” or “mesh.” This is connected to Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of the radical imagination and his metaphor of “magma,” which is discussed in Sect. 3.1
4. This insight can even be found in approaches to media theory that otherwise focus more on the “hard facts” of the history of science and technology: “For flm did not fall from heaven, but rather it can only be understood through the fantasies and the politics that its invention was responding to. The fact that television, as far as I can see, was not once seriously imagined until its factual development also calls for analysis.” (Kittler 2010, 22).
5. The present book is intended as an attempt at an overview that offers perspective. There are in-depth analyses of the connection of digital media and the imagination, but here we can only refer to them. For detailed discussion, see, for example, Winkler (1997) and Harrell (2013).
RefeReNces
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blarney. Malden, MA: Polity. Ceruzzi, Paul E. 2011. Manned Space Flight and Artifcial Intelligence: ‘Natural Trajectories of Technology’. In Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains, ed. David L. Ferro and Eric G. Swedin, 95–116. Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland & Company.
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Einstein, Albert. 1929. What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck. The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 17, 110, 113, 114, 117. freeCodeCamp. 2017. The Absolute Worst Technology Predictions of the Past 150 Years. Accessed November 22, 2019. https://www.freecodecamp.org/ news/worst-tech-predictions-of-the-past-100-years-c18654211375/
Glaubitz, Nicola, Henning Groscurth, Katja Hoffmann, Jörgen Schäfer, Jens Schröter, Gregor Schwering, and Jochen Venus. 2011. Eine Theorie der Medienumbrüche, 1900/2000. Siegen: Universi. Harrell, D. Fox. 2013. Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 2010. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Translated by Anthony Enns. Malden, MA: Polity. Montfort, Nick. 2017. The Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pethes, Nicolas. 2003. ‘Thinking Ahead’: Fiction as Prediction in Popular Scripts on Political Scenarios. Soziale Systeme 9 (2): 272–284. Rescher, Nicholas. 1998. Predicting the Future: An Introduction to the Theory of Forecasting. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2009. Future Knowledge and Its Problems. In Unknowability: An Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge, ed. Nicholas Rescher, 11–19. Lanham: Lexington. ———. 2012. The Problem of Future Knowledge. Mind & Society 11: 149–163. Stork, David G., ed. 1997. Hal’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Winkler, Hartmut. 1997. Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer. Munich: Boer.
CHAPTER
2
Media Change as a Cultural Phenomenon
Abstract This chapter formulates fve theses on the connection between media change and the future.
Keywords Media change • Future media • Future • New media
2.1
Future Media: Five theses
Speaking of future media means speaking of a knowledge that is present at a certain point in the evolution of media. The complementary question is what knowledge about the future is available (Weidner and Willer 2013). As current “mappings” of core concepts of knowledge about the future show, however, media technologies play a key role in this process.1 We would like to derive fve theses from this simple observation.
Media make objects perceptible; information is processed with their aid; they make communication possible; they are the memory of a culture and of a society (Kittler 1993a, 8). As such, however, media are also subject to constant change. Just as culture and society change media, conversely, media change has an effect on culture and society. If television was still a primary medium in the 1980s and 1990s, the situation today is distinctly more complicated. Television has not disappeared, but with the emergence of the World Wide Web, the technology on which it is based and the practices of its use have changed. The signifcance of television as
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a medium for producing a political public sphere or as a medium of entertainment is not the same as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Every message on television is refected in a public sphere on the web in which its truth content is questioned and combated—a practice that television has long since integrated into its political broadcasts.
Because this interaction between media, culture, and society exists, it is important for the various actors to know something about media change. This knowledge about media change refers to a given situation in which the media landscape changes; currently, for example, digitalization is identifed as the driving factor. In order to have a reference point in the present to assess a process of development, one has to make assumptions about how the media change might take shape—that is, to assume future turning and end points.2 Condensed in this thinking about possibilities are expectations and desires, visions and fears, deliberations and calculations that are part of the collective imaginary.
Against this backdrop, the frst thesis concerns the relationship between future media and media change.
Because it refers to the future but the future is by defnition something absent, knowledge about media change is formed by the imagination, that is, by existing ideas about future media. Imagination and future media meet in the combination of media change and references to future states of affairs. Imaginations about future media are part of media change:
First Thesis: Future media exist as possible objects produced by the imagination that shape practical and theoretical knowledge about processes of media change in the present. By imagining future media as possible objects, one obtains a “picture” of media change.
If we speak of media change, it is frst necessary to determine what we mean by “media.” There are many possibilities. Theorists have already declared a number of things to be the medium—light, language, the computer, and many more. There is a tendency in history to ask what can be used as a medium. Around 1900, for example, it was thought that electric light could be used to communicate with extraterrestrials on Mars (Marvin 1986, 214).
The second thesis concerns the relationship between future media and media technology.
Media change is for the most part understood as a phenomenon related to media technologies. This restriction to technological media is
important. Other media, such as language, change more slowly. The class of technological media includes such media as writing, book printing, photography, telegraphy, flm, radio, television, the computer, and the internet.3 One contemporary leading medium is the smartphone. The success of the smartphone since the iPhone was presented by Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, in 2007 is impressive. The questions as to how the smartphone will develop and what leading medium will follow it are highly relevant right now. Media evolve in association with science and technology and are subject to strong economic infuences.
Second Thesis: The term “future media” refers to imagining media technologies. Imagining media technologies is tied to heterogeneous discourses in which scientifc inventions, technological innovations, and economic interests interact and are focused on specifc objects.
Against the backdrop of expectations driven by science and economics that innovation contains an inherent promise for the future, in modern society “new media” are viewed as “future” technologies: “in the popular imagination, technology is often synonymous with the future” (Sturken and Thomas 2004, 6).
The third thesis concerns the relationship between future media and new media. It is important to see that new media are future media only in a specifc sense. The unaltered endurance of existing media is also one case of future media. But one tends not to think of that when talking about future media. This close connection between the “new” and the “future” is related to the fact that the concept of future is infuenced by the concept of scientifc and technological innovation in an economic order based on markets. The accent of the “future” is not on preservation but on change. This is expressed in the oft-criticized term “new media” (Marvin 1988; Kittler 1999).
Third Thesis: Future media are not identical to “new media.” Rather, under existing social conditions, talk about “new media” is a form of speaking which addresses “new media” as “future media.”
When future media are seen as “new media,” they are often linked to “media revolutions” (Grampp et al. 2008). Media change produces dynamic situations in which a culture’s practices and a society’s ways of life change. User interfaces are, for example, key technologies of digital media
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but are developed in an environment in which they can very quickly become superfuous (“rapid obsolescence,” Grudin 2012, xxviii). But the talk of media revolutions conceals the immense importance of continual developments and transitions (Winston 1998, 1–15). The transition from command-line interfaces to graphic user interfaces also took place in steps. It only accelerated when economic interests came into play in the early 1980s that brought this technology to the broad mass market. The observation that media change has taken place therefore occurs ex post when a medium has arrived in daily life (Glaubitz et al. 2011).
The fourth thesis concerns the relationship of future media and media upheavals. When a media change has profound social effects, it causes a “media upheaval” (Glaubitz et al. 2011). The transition from commandline interfaces to graphic user interfaces was one such upheaval. The “computer as medium” (Bolz et al. 1994; Andersen et al. 1993; Friedewald 1999) became useful on the mass market thanks to such interfaces. Similarly, the success of the smartphone would have been inconceivable without a gesture-based interface. Interface technologies are one example demonstrating that in a market-based environment it can be very valuable to have expert knowledge about such processes.
Fourth Thesis: Media upheavals are processes of media change that are marked by the tension between continuity and change. In these processes, imagining future media is intended to show which future scenarios are possible and how profound their probable consequences are—in the sense of knowledge that provides orientation.
Imagining future media can provide knowledge about media change that provides orientation. This knowledge sometimes mobilizes ideas that are stored deeply in the collective memory of a culture. They correspond to the necessity to picture for oneself what has become possible as a result of the upheaval and to sort which of its elements are realistic from those that are not realistic. Media upheavals demand thinking about possibilities. Not infrequently, this results in the case that media upheavals—like technological upheavals in general—make it possible to realistically expect things that had been articulated as an idea before the upheaval but were considered impossible. Imagination is the ability to picture something individually and collectively; in historical cultural and social situations, the imaginary offers an inventory of culturally specifc forms of what one can imagine.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Principles and practice of agricultural analysis. Volume 1 (of 3), Soils
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Title: Principles and practice of agricultural analysis. Volume 1 (of 3), Soils
Author: Harvey Washington Wiley
Release date: March 31, 2024 [eBook #73302]
Language: English
Original publication: Easton: Chemical Publishing Co, 1894
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Peter Becker, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF AGRICULTURAL ANALYSIS. VOLUME 1 (OF 3), SOILS
Transcriber’s Note:
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PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE
AGRICULTURAL ANALYSIS.
A MANUAL FOR THE ESTIMATION OF SOILS, FERTILIZERS, AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS.
FOR THE USE OF ANALYSTS, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS OF AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY.
VOLUME I. SOILS.
BY HARVEY W. WILEY, C
U. S. D A .
EASTON, PA., C P C , 1894.
COPYRIGHT, 1895, B H W. W .
PREFACE TO VOLUME FIRST.
In this volume I have endeavored to place in the hands of teachers and students of Agricultural Analysis, and of analysts generally, the principles which underlie the science and art of the analysis of soils and the best approved methods of conducting it.
In the prosecution of the work I have drawn freely on the results of experience in all countries, but especially in the matter of the physical examinations of soils, of this country. Science is not delimited by geographic lines, but an author is not to be blamed in first considering favorably the work of the country in which he lives. It is only when he can see nothing of good outside of its own boundaries that he should be judged culpable. It has been my wish to give full credit to those from whose work the subject-matter of this volume has been largely taken. If, in any case, there has been neglect in this matter, it has not been due to any desire on my part to bear the honors which rightfully belong to another. With no wish to discriminate, where so many favors have been extended, especial acknowledgments should be made to Messrs. Hilgard, Osborne, Whitney, and Merrill, for assistance in reading the manuscript of chapters relating to the origin of soils, their physical properties, and mechanical analysis. With the wish that this volume may prove of benefit to the workers for whom it was written I offer it for their consideration.
H. W. W .
W , D. C., Beginning of January, 1895.
TABLE OF CONTENTS OF VOLUME FIRST.
PART FIRST.
Introduction, pp. 1–27.—Definitions; Origin of soil; Chemical elements in the soil; Atomic masses; Properties of the elements; Relative abundance of the elements; Minerals occurring in rocks; Classification of minerals.
Rocks and Rock Decay, pp. 28–43.—Types of rocks; Microscopical Structure of Rocks; Composition of rocks; Color of rocks; Kinds of rocks; Eruptive rocks.
Origin of Soils, pp. 43–63.—Decay of rocks; Effect of latitude on decay; Action of water; Action of vegetable life; Action of worms and bacteria; Action of air; Classification of soils; Qualities and kinds of soils; Humus; Soil and subsoil; Authorities cited in part first.
PART SECOND.
Taking Samples for Analysis, pp. 65–86.—General principles; General directions for sampling; Method of Hilgard; Official French method; Caldwell’s, Wahnschaffe’s, Peligot’s, and Whitney’s methods; Samples for moisture; Samples for permeability; Samples for staple crops; Method of the Royal Agricultural Society; Method of Grandeau; Method of Official Agricultural Chemists; Method of Lawes; Instruments for taking samples; Principles of success in sampling.
Treatment of Sample in the Laboratory, pp. 87–93.—Preliminary examination; Treatment of loose soils; Treatment of compact soils; Miscellaneous methods; Authorities cited in part second.
PART THIRD.
Physical Properties of Soils, pp. 95–101.—The soil as a mass; Color of soils; Odoriferous matters in soils; Specific gravity; Apparent specific gravity.
Relation of Soil to Heat, pp. 102–103.—Sources of soil heat; Specific heat; Absorption of solar heat.
Determination of Specific Heat, pp. 104–110.—General principles; Method of Pfaundler; Variation of specific heat.
Soil Thermometry, pp. 111–115.—General principles; Frear’s method of stating results; Method of Whitney and Marvin.
Applications of Soil Thermometry, pp. 115–116.—Absorption of heat; Conductivity of soils for heat.
Cohesion and Adhesion of Soils, pp. 116–117.—Behavior of soil after wetting; Methods of determining cohesion and adhesion; Adhesion of soil to wood and iron.
Absorption by Soils, pp. 117–130.—General principles; Summary of data; Cause of absorption; Deductions of Warington, Way, and Armsby; Selective absorption of potash; Influence of surface area; Effect of removal of organic matters; Importance of soil absorption; Methods of determining absorption; Statement of results; Preparation of salts for absorption.
Relations of Porosity to Soil Moisture, pp. 131–150.—Definition of porosity; Influence of drainage; Capacity of soil for moisture; Determination of porosity; Whitney’s method; Relation of fine soil to moisture; Wolff’s and Wahnschaffe’s method; Petermann’s method; Mayer’s method; Volumetric determination; Wollny’s method; Heinrich’s method; Effect of pressure on water capacity; Coefficient of evaporation; Determination of capillary attraction; Inverse capillarity; Determination of coefficient of evaporation; Wolff’s method; Water given off in a water-free atmosphere; Porosity of soil for gases; Determination of permeability in the field.
Movement of Water Through Soils: Lysimetry, pp. 151–170.— Porosity in relation to water movement; Methods of water
movement; Capillary movement of water; Causes of water movement; Surface tension of fertilizers; Methods of estimating surface tension; Preparation of soil extracts; Lysimetry; Relative rate of flow of water through soils; Measurement of rate of percolation; Authorities cited in part third.
PART FOURTH.
MECHANICAL ANALYSIS.
The Flocculation of Soil Particles, pp. 171–185.—Relation of flocculation to mechanical analysis; Effect of potential of surface particles; Destruction of floccules; Suspension of clay in water; effect of chemical action; Theory of Barus; Physical explanation of subsidence; Separation of soil into particles of standard size; Mechanical separation; Sifting with water.
Separation of Soil Particles by a Liquid, pp. 185–207.— Classification of methods of silt analysis; Methods depending on subsidence of soil particles; Methods of Kühn, Knop, Wolff, Moore, Bennigsen, and Gasparin; Method of Osborne; Schloesing’s method.
Separation of Soil Particles by a Liquid in Motion, pp. 207–247.— General principles; Nöbel’s Apparatus; Method of Dietrich; Method of Masure; Method of Schöne; Mayer’s method; Osborne-Schöne method; Statement of results; Berlin-Schöne method; Hilgard’s method; Colloidal clay; Properties of pure clay; Separation of fine sediments; Weighing sediments; Classification of results; Comparison of methods.
Miscellaneous Determinations, pp. 247–281.—Mechanical determination of clay; Effect of boiling on clay; General conclusions; Distribution of soil ingredients; Percentage of silt by classes; Interpretation of silt analysis; Number of soil particles; Surface area of soil particles; Logarithmic constants; Mineralogical examination of silt; Microscopical examination; Petrographic microscope; Forms and dimensions of particles; Silt classes; Crystal angles; Refractive index; Polarized light; Staining silt particles; Cleavage of soil particles; Microchemical examination of silt particles; Petrographic examination of silt particles; Separation of silt particles by specific gravity; Separation with a magnet; Color and transparency; Value of silt analyses; Authorities cited in part fourth.
PART FIFTH.
Estimation of Gases in Soils, pp. 282–300.—Carbon dioxid; Aqueous vapor; Maximum hygroscopic coefficient; Absorption of aqueous vapors; Oxygen and air; General method of determining absorption; Special methods; Diffusion of carbon dioxid; General conclusions; Authorities cited in part fifth.
