understanding that its technique will be learned elsewhere. It is recognized
that soil mechanics has little significance outside of reality, and that we study idealized models because of our limitations, and not because their mathe matical elegance is intellectually satisfying. All soil mechanics problems have a practical basis in the properties of real soils, properties which can only be elicited by testing. Consequently, soil testing techniques are important, and it is necessary for the student to be thoroughly familiar with them. How ever, only to a limited extent are their details important to his understanding of the mechanics of soil behavior, and I have therefore confined myself in the text to the briefest descriptions of tests. Because an amplification of some point in the testing procedures is occasionally necessary, and since some of the discussions in the text require an understanding of the mechanics of the tests, I have included a discussion of soil testing procedures in Ap pendix A. Sometimes approximate estimates of stresses or displacements in soils based on those occurring in linearly elastic materials subjected to applied stress are of value to the soil engineer, and, since the appropriate equations and numerical evaluations are widely scattered throughout the literature, I have collected some of the more useful ones, together with references to sources, in Appendix B. As a supplement to the material in Chapter 9, Appendix C sets forth the bases of the calculation of the yield stresses in plane strain problems. The interested reader will find his understanding of the geometrical mechanisms of yield considerably deepened by solving one or two problems by the methods discussed in Appendix C. The detailed derivations of equations describing certain phenomena have been given, not because I am under any delusions as to their exactitude or applicability, but so that the student may gain experience in thinking about and dealing with the complexities of two- and three-phase systems. In reducing general expressions to their final expedient form, I have tried to point out clearly which eliminations are dictated by our ignorance of material behavior, and which are rendered necessary by either the difficulty of solving the resulting equations or by practical problems involved in the measurement of suitable parameters. I have found that this procedure gives students a better understanding of the physical processes and the limitations of our knowledge than they obtain from a list of "assumptions." In addition, the areas where material or mathematical research would be helpful are well marked. It may be mentioned here — since it is a point seldom brought up — that the passage to the limit of all differential elements in soil mechanics analyses is restricted by the size of the discrete particles. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, it is taken for granted in this text that the size of a mass of soil under examination is very large in relation to the grain size, so that, for instance, the couples acting on individual particles are small in relation to the direct stresses on elemental faces. The problems given at the end of each chapter have been selected from those given to my soil mechanics classes in formal examinations and as homework