308 Notices respecting New Books. 



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discovered in our own islands, for the purpose of comparing their 

 relative properties and the vakie which they are hkely to possess 

 ill sculpture. I am unfortunately unable to give any account of 

 those found in Ireland, neither having seen their places, nor being 

 possessed of anv specimens. 



" That which has been found at Cape Wrath in Scotland, isof- 

 a grain much larger than even the Parian, and is consequently 

 lifeless for the purpose of sculpture; and this indeed is by much 

 the most common character of the Scottish specimens. Those oi 

 Blairgowrie, of Glenavon, and of Balahulish, arc all equally cha- 

 racterized by this large sparry texture, and are all equally unf t 

 for sculpture, however applicable to the purposes of architecture. 

 The marble of lona has been long iince exhausted, and conse- 

 quently requires no particular notice : however valuable from the 

 purity of its colour and compactness of its texture, yet the uncer- 

 tainty of its splintery fracture before the chisel, (that tool without 

 which no spirited work was ever finished,) combined with its great 

 hardness, would probably have rendered it useless in the arts, even 

 if it were still to be procured. 



" In a paper on Assynt I have already described the white 

 marble of that district: it is of avery close texture, and although it 

 contains no earth but lime, is of unusual specific gravity and hard- 

 ness. It is incapable of being polished, a circumstance, it is true, 

 of no consequence in statuary, since the polish only gives a false 

 light to the surface and is not admitted of in modern sculpture; 

 but it labours under the concomitant disadvantage of want of 

 transparency, producing nearly the same dead effect and dry out- 

 line as is seen in a plaster cast, a fault in itself sufficient to pre- 

 vent it from ever being adopted as a good material in the arts : 

 ito extreme hardness also renders it very expensive to work. 



" The marble of Sky, the more ininisd-.ate object of this dis- 

 cussion, is of a pure white colour, and appears sufficiently exten- 

 sive and continuous to be capable of yielding large blocks. Th* 

 purity of its colour is seldom contaminated ; its fracture is gra- 

 nular and splintery, and its texture fine, less fine than that of 

 lona, but more so than that of Assynt : its compactness, hardness, 

 and gravity, are greater than those of the marble of Carrara, 

 which it in fact resembles in little else than colour. It is appa- 

 rently well fitted for all purposes of sculpture, as it can be wrought 

 in any direction, and has sufficient transparency, while at the same 

 time it assumes even a better polish than is required for statuary. 

 With these good qualities, however, is combined an uncertainty 

 arising from its unequal hardness. While some parts of the stone 

 are nearly as easy to work as that of Carrara, many other speci- 

 mens turn out so hard as to add a charge of near .50 per cent, to 

 the cost of working : this appears to arise from the influence of 



the 



