FORTY MILLIONS IN A TEASPOONFUL.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18872, 26 May 1923, Page 3

FORTY MILLIONS IN A TEASPOONFUL.

SCIENTIST’S CENSUS OF THE SOIL. What Sir John Russell claims to be the most remarkable census ever taken has been carried out at Rothnmpstead experimental station. It was a soil census. The number of organisms in one single gramme of soil, no more than a teaspoonful, often well exceeds 40,000,000. “ff each unit in the whole array,” says Nature, “could ho magnified up to the sice of a man, and the whole caused to march past in single file, they would go in a steady stream, every hour of the day and night for a year, a month, and a day, before they had all passed.” It, was discovered how to count these organisms,' and the census was made everyday for 365 consecutive days. No fewer than 17 different organisms were enumerated. . . One of the most interesting results was the proof that the soil population is not steady in number, as had always been assumed, but is in a violent state of flux. Daily variations were shown independent of external conditions. The whole soil population is depressed in winter and in summer, and is uplifted in spring and autumn. How this comes about wo do not know. We must think of the apparently lifeless soil as really throbbing with life, changing daily mid hourly in obedience to some great laws which we have not yet discovered.