A Soil Reconnaissance Journey Through Parts of Tanganyika Territory December 1935 To February 1936

Abstract

When Geoffrey Milne's grand and stimulating Reconnaissance Report was first circulated in typescript to various Technical Departments and interested individuals towards the end of 1936, the desire was keenly felt to have this masterful exposition of many' burning' problems brought to the notice of a wider scientific circle. And when, at about the same time, Prof. :A. G. Tansley, of Oxford, in a letter to Millme regarding the Itigi thicket controversy, expressed his conviction that 'the soil-vegetation complex is in many ways so intimately one thing that it should be dealt with as a whole', and' that it is all to the good that plant ecologists should have their attention firmly directed to pedology', the possibility of covering Milne's ground in a joint paper with B. D. Burtt was ventilated. But fate willed otherwise. Leave movements of Burtt in 1937 and of Milne in 1938 first delayed, and then Burtt's deplorable death in 1938 put a sad stop to further progress in this direction_ On his return from Central and North: America late in 1938, Milne was preoccupied with more pressing work, and then the war demanded his brain and energy to work on problems very different from those of long-range research. Thus, when early in 1942 we had to adjust ourselves to the irretrievable loss caused by his premature death,