This book is a unified, condensed, and simplified version of the recently issued twin volumes, Fundamentals of Soil Physics and Applications of Soil Physics. Nonessential topics and complexities have been deleted, and little prior knowledge of the subject is assumed. An effort has been made to provide an elementary, readable, and self-sustaining description of the soil's physical properties and of the manner in which these properties govern the processes taking place in the field. Consideration is given to the ways in which the soil's processes can be influenced, for better or...

This book is not, in any case, in total defiance of the Wise Old Man's admonition, for it is not an entirely new book. Rather, it is an outgrowth of a previous treatise, written a decade ago, entitled "Soil and Water: Physical Principles and Processes." Though that book was well enough received at the time, the passage of the years has inevitably made it necessary to either revise and update the same book, or to supplant it with a fresh approach in the form of a new book which might incorporate still-pertient aspects of its predecessor without necessarily being limited to the older book's...