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 Book Review of and Excerpts from:

Harper & Row Publishers, NY
ISBN 0-06-015817-4
Lib. Congr. S591.T64

This is a great book! The Boston Herald was quoted writing, “A worthy sequel to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring”


Introduction (p. xi)







Claws of Chelation (Chapter X, pp. 116-127) pays tribute to Dr. Albert Schatz (, and his expertise in the field of pedology (meaning, “soil science” from which we derive the word “peds” from the Greek.  For additional detail on soil structure, please consult:  )

 “In 1966, Schatz was invited to write an article for Compost Science, published by the Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pennsylvania to explain why soil research, subsidized almost completely by the U.S. fertilizer industry, was leading to a decreasing interest in humus and soil organic matter in the United States to the point of near extinction.
The central problem, to Schatz, was that the grants to colleges of agriculture provide continual financial support to an army of graduate students while at the same time their professors are raking off thousands of dollars as consultants to the same fertilizer moguls who are supporting the students’ research.

The research problems pursued are predominantly those from which the fertilizer companies can make more profit, while the indoctrinated graduate students go on to work along the same lines after receiving their degrees, and those receiving teaching appointments train new student in the same chemically-oriented philosophy.

‘Thus’, wrote Schatz, ‘with each passing generation, humus and soil organic matter become more and more abstract textbook topics which gradually lose their identity as real objects of vital interest.  This decreasing attention dramatically illustrates how private and selfish economic interest can distortedly influence the direction of scientific research in a major discipline.’

This neglect has resulted in a corresponding decline in soil microbiology.  Graduates originally trained in the discipline were herd-mindedly rushing to accept lucrative appointments in pharmaceutical, fermentation, and fertilizer industries, where financial remuneration was steeply higher than in university faculties.”

Dr. Schatz, however, apart from his disgust with the prevalent “NPK mentality”, is perhaps best appreciated for his understanding of chelation and the colloidal properties of humus.   His initial curiosity with the ability of lichens to apparently weather rock led him to the following observations explained in Secrets of The Soil. 

“Taken from the Greek word chela, meaning ‘claw’ or ‘pincer’ it is the property that allows the formation of a ring-shaped chemical structure, based on six carbon atoms, that enables lichens to clamp onto free floating metal ions.  The ensuing more-complex compounds can then be absorbed by the lichen; once within their bodies, the metals are released to serve whatever function is required.  The chemical explanation for this canny phenomenon is that in chelation one or more electrons can be shared between two elements, dragging the metals along to be released as the compound is soluble in water.

Chelating substances, present in up to 36 percent of the dry weight of lichens, give them the power to dissolve iron and other metallic minerals, grab them, and such them up, enabling them to feast directly on the hard bare rock.

In 1954, Schatz published in the Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Academy of Sciences the first of a series of papers: ‘Chelation as a Biological Weathering Factor in Pedogenesis.’  As he continued to work on the problem, it came to him that if the chelating process could explain the predisposition of lichens to dine on no more appetizing a menu than a rock surface, it could also be importantly involved in the creation of soil fertility.  Were the plants not creating soil just as the soil created plants?  And was soil formation not an ongoing process that maintained fertility?

‘It was when I found out how lichens were chelating rock to extract minerals,’ said Schatz, ‘that I said to myself that something in the soil had to be working in the same way to keep on forming it from solid rock…It was then that I concluded that there had to be a chelating agent in humus’.

The clue—or—claw—with which to unravel the mysterious mechanism of chelation came to Schatz when he ran across an article published 160 years ago in a Boston newspaper, The New England Farmer.”

Curiously, this same clue may be able to explain how the ancient Incas were able to so precisely cut angles into monolithic stone to form their giant fortress structures—the book goes on to explain (pp. 122-125).

“At the University of California’s College of Agriculture, Schatz gave a lecture on ‘The Importance of Metal-Binding Phenomena in the Chemistry and Microbiology of the Soil,’ in which he presented all his experimental results…‘No one in the United States seemed to care about the subject,’ said Schatz, (p. 126) ‘though it is vitally connected with health, not only that of plants, but our own.’

Chelation goes on not only in the soil and in microbes but in the cells of plants and in the bodies of animal and humans.  How closely plants and humans are related can be explained by the extraordinary fact that both depend on a chelating chemical compound basic to their physiology.  In man it is the deep red heme that transports in the blood the oxygen liberated by plants, which themselves have a compound, green-colored chlorophyll, that is so similar to heme that, to depict its chemical formula, it is necessary only to substitute an iron atom for one of magnesium.  ‘It is one of nature’s miracle,’ says Schatz, ‘that it could so simply modify a key life-compound, one way for animals, and another way for plants.’

Asked why the feeder roots of plants prefer the humus packed in a below-ground open jar to the soil around it, as demonstrated in Podolinsky’s experiment, Schatz replied: ‘First, because the trace minerals prized by plants are more readily available in humus since it has already acted as a chelating agent to solubilize them.  Secondly, the far greater microbial activity in the jar breaks down the humus itself so that the roots can absorb the organic products coming out of it.’

With respect to the colloidal nature of humus and compost (p. 127), Schatz pointed out that the whole of humus is not made of colloid substances but only that part which is chemically constituted to act as a chelate.  The reason colloids remain in a liquid suspension, he added, is that their surface-to-mass ratio is enormous.  To illustrate his point, Schatz put a large wad of ordinary steel wool in a tinned coffee can and applied a match to it.  The wool exploded into a white-hot flame.  ‘If you try to ignite an iron nail with a match,’ he said, ‘nothing happens’.   But if you convert the iron in it to very fine steel wool, the surface to mass ratio, as in colloids, becomes very large.  If you weigh the wool before and after burning you’ll find the weight has increased because the final product is no longer just the iron, but iron plus oxygen, or iron oxide (“rust”).  The same thing happens with an iron nail if you allow it to rust in water, the difference being that in the burning of steel wool the oxidation effects are far more rapid.

‘To relate this to the chelating and colloidal properties of humus means that their combination brings about a faster and greater chemical effect than if they were both not acting in conjunction.  Nutritionally speaking, whereas a pig, or human being, can’t eat a nail, it can easily ingest chelated iron.’”

To be continued…