Soil texture are the medium-sized (0.05 - 0.002 mm) and sink to the bottom of the cylinder after the sand. Clay particles are the smallest (<0.002 mm) and separate out above the silt layer. Measurements are taken using a soil hydrometer. A soil hydrometer measures that relative density of liquids (density of a liquid to the density of water). The hydrometer is lowered into the cylinder containing the soil mixture at different times, forty-five seconds to measure sand content, one and a half hours to measure silt content and between six and twenty-four hours (depending on the protocol used) to measure clay.
Soil specific surface area and its unbalanced negative electric charges, clay is the most active mineral component of soil. It is a colloidal and most often a crystalline material. In soils, clay is a soil textural class and is defined in a physical sense as any mineral particle less than in effective diameter. Many soil minerals, such as gypsum, carbonates, or quartz, are small enough to be classified as clay based on their physical size, but chemically they do not afford the same utility as do mineralogically-defined clay minerals. Chemically, clay minerals are a range of phyllosilicate minerals with certain reactive