of a part of the Saguenay Country. 91 
sede the necessity of importing this article. 14 will not therefore 
be a misplaced enquiry to examine the several properties of 
those marbles which have at different times held a place in the 
estimation of artists, and to compare them with our own speci- 
mens, more particularly with that of Sky, now under review, 
the most abundant and certainly the most specious of all those 
which have yet been found in Britain. The enquiry is the 
more necessary, as the several circumstances in which white 
marbles differ, do not appear to have been generally attended 
to, and as an undue value seems in some instances to have been 
fixed on our own in popular estimation, although not in that 
of sculptors themselves. . 
** The value of this substance in those distant periods when 
the arts of Greece flourished, occasioned an industrious 
research after a material in which the sublime ideas of 
its artists could be embodied. Accordingly many quarries 
have been wrought in ancient times, of which little has de- 
scended to us but the names, and a few of the works which 
were executed from their produce. These marbles were of va- 
rious qualities, and examples of them are still to be seen in 
ancient statues, although with regard to many of them a species 
of evidence often little better than conjectural, has guided 
sculptors and mineralogists in their attempts to determine the 
quarries from whence they were derived. Amwug these, the 
quarries of Paros afforded a marble, (the often quoted lychnites 
of Pliny) in which it is asserted that the celebrated Venus 
was wrought, as well as some others to which we have not dc. 
cess. But there are many specimens of sculpture in the Bri- 
tish Museum which seem to have been executed in this stone 
or one at least of analogous character. 
“Of the nature of the Parian Marble we are enabled to 
_ speak positively, since some blocks of it have been quarried 
during the last few years, and are now to be found in the shops 
of the sculptors of this city. The grain of this marble is large 
and 
