Soil enzymology has a long history. The earliest report of soil enzymes was by Woods (1899), who determined the activity of oxidizing enzymes and hypothesized that these enzymes occurred in the extracellular soil environment. This report was followed by a series of studies mainly dealing with catalase activity, which is relatively easy to detect (see review by Skujins, 1978). In the first half of the twentieth century, soil solutions were compared with animal blood, and Quastel (1946) suggested that soil could be considered a living tissue. This period, termed “the long childhood” by Skujins (1978), can be characterized by the development of several assays for measurement of hydrolase and oxidase activities in soil. However, scientific advancements in the field of soil enzymology were made in the 1920s with the establishment of accurate analytical assays and discussion of (1) the meaning of enzyme measurements in soil, (2) the different locations of enzymes in the soil matrix and (3) the ecological importance of extracellularly stabilized enzymes, which are protected from microbial degradation by adsorption onto surface-reactive particles or entrapment by soil particles. Skujins (1978) coined the term “abiontic” to represent all extracellular enzymes, i.e. those stabilized in soil and also those released by active cells or after cell lysis and those present in dead cells or cell debris. Importantly, the activity of abiontic enzymes is not controlled by the soil microbiome, and these enzymes can thus contribute to soil functions even when the conditions do not favour microbial activity. Burns (1982) hypothesized that the presence of stabilized extracellular enzymes could favour the detection and use of exogenous substrates by the soil microbiome. In the 1920s, measurement of enzyme activities was combined with that of other biochemical and microbiological properties to obtain insights into soil fertility and crop yields. The enzyme activities were considered indicators of soil fertility and of the status of polluted and degraded/restored soils and prediction of the effects of climate change on soil metabolic activity. Between the 1950s and 1970s, both Western and Eastern European research groups contributed extensively to soil enzymology (Skujins, 1978). Although some of the most productive laboratories published their studies in Russian, the main findings are available in English, thanks to the excellent reviews by Skujins (1978) and Kuprevich and Shcherbakova (1971). The fact that important reviews on soil enzymology were published in books and journal issues not accessible to electronic searches led to some shortcomings in soil enzyme measurements and the complexity of the measurement interpretations being ignored around the turn of the century. In particular, it was (and still is) generally assumed that enzyme assays determine extracellular activity and that the activities of one or two enzymes can be used as proxies for C-, N- or P-acquiring processes. These assumptions led to the spread of misconceptions, as already discussed by Nannipieri et al. (2018). The early 2000s were characterized by the use of molecular techniques to characterize the diversity and activity of the soil microbiome, which provided insights into the source of enzymes contributing to the measured activity, a long-standing knowledge gap in soil enzymology.