triads and edaphic and aquatic and epedaphic and eudaphic

I have remarked elsewhere regarding the similarity of the advice I received both in legal and theological education on how to put together an oral argument or sermon. In short, I was urged to think and speak "in threes." Listeners want fewer than four and more than two points, I was told. After writing an essay on this subject, I remember receiving in the mail a huge laminated poster, with thousands of lists of threes occurring in nature, literature or elsewhere, compiled by a retired gentleman who wanted me to have a copy of it. It really is a unique document, and I will write on it elsewhere. I think his point was that the idea of three is not simply a convention taught to lawyers and ministers but that it is imprinted in the structure of the human mind.

I claim ignorance on this last point, but I did note, as I was returning to my study of words today, the way that threes seem to cluster, even in scientific terminology. Today I will introduce the following triads: (1) aquatic, edaphic and epedaphic; (2) xeric, mesic and hydric; and (3) oligotrophic, mesotrophic and eutrophic. What do you think about threes?

Aquatic, Edaphic, Epedaphic

These three words relate to regions of the earth: the water, the "soil," and the atmosphere. The first quotation (from the Britannica Encyclopedia of 1900) using all three has: "The varying climatic or environmental conditions to which Angiosperms may be exposed in their wide distribution, including those of the soil, edaphic, those of the atmosphere, epedaphic (li. "on top of" or "atop" the soil), and those of water, aquatic." As the British divided the world into categories for purposes of colonization, the encyclopedia divided the physical universe into categories for purposes of description and mastery. Though this quotation divided the world into threes, I was reminded in reading it of Genesis 1, which only divides the world into twos. Recall from the opening words of the Bible that creation was by the Word and resulted in an act of separation. For example, in Gen. 1:4, after God created light, the text says: "And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness." But one separation wasn't good enought for God. Soon, he said, in 1:6, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." Unlike the British colonialists in the 19th century, God didn't divide things into water, earth and air as the categories of creation--he simply divided things into "above" and "below." At least that is the story in the priestly narrative of Gen. 1.

Though aquatic is attested everywhere we look in our society, edaphic has been taken over by the biologists. A quick internet search will yield not simply the word edaphology (the study of soils) but also the phrases edaphic conditions, edaphic factors and even edaphic climax. The last has nothing to do with a certain kind of orgasm, but is defined as "a[n] [ecological] community that has reached the stable stage." Quoting further from this website:

"When extensive and well defined, the climax community is called a biome. Examples are tundra, grassland, desert, and the deciduous, coniferous, and tropical rain forests. Stability is attained through a process known as succession, whereby relatively simple communities are replaced by those more complex. Thus, on a lakefront, grass may invade a build-up of sand. Humus formed by the grass then gives root to oaks and pines and lesser vegetation, which displaces the grass and forms a further altered humus. That soil eventually nourishes maple and beech trees, which gradually crowd out the pines and oaks and form a climax community."

Isn't this interesting? Thus an ecologist would say that an ecological community progresses from simple to climax communities rather than from simple to complex. As for the word epedaphic, it has all but disappeared from our language. The OED doesn't even have a separate entry for it. I think part of the reason is confusion as to its meaning. Does it mean "atmospheric," as suggested by the first attestation of its usage, or merely on the top layer of the soil? Well, I could go pretty far afield here, because the few appearances of epedaphic on the Net also have words such as eudaphic (something about living "well" in the soil, I presume) and even hemiedaphic (I haven't a clue). Let's come down to earth and leave this triad.

The next essay continues our exploration of triads.

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