Pedology is the branch of the natural sciences that deals with the biogeochemical processes that form and distribute soils across the globe. The word ‘pedology’ was coined by the German scientist F. A. Fallou in 1862 (Tandarich and Sprecher, 1994; Oxford Dictionary, 1966), but the point in time that it became a true science rests upon when theories of the soil and its formation were developed and adopted by the early pedological community (Kuhn, 1962). An exhaustive historical analysis of the development of pedology has not been conducted, though we know that numerous ‘scientific’ advances were made during the nineteenth century by scholars in several countries. For example, Eugene Hilgard arguably was the premier soil scientist of the nineteenth century. His breadth of knowledge, scientific techniques (chemical and physical), and his mastery of multiple disciplines made him a truly formidable presence on the international geological and agricultural science scenes (Jenny, 1961; Amundson and Yaalon, 1995; Amundson, 2005a). Yet, as his biographer Hans Jenny (1961) concluded, Hilgard did not distil his vast knowledge and concepts into neat conceptual models or theories. Although one can easily see that Hilgard clearly understood the important controls on soil formation, an elucidation of these into a concise intellectual package was ultimately accomplished by others. First, Vasily Dokuchaev and his Russian colleagues identified and discussed what we now know commonly today as the ‘factors of soil formation’ (Dokuchaev, 1883).