vi PREFACE

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