ROCKS. 263 



formation. In Attica, in the island of Eubosa, and in the 

 Peloponnesus, it has been remarked, " that the limestone, 

 when superposed on mica slate, is beautiful and crystalline in 

 proportion to the purity of the latter substance and to the 

 femallness of its argillaceous contents ; and, as is well known, 

 this rock, together with beds of gneiss, appears at many points, 

 at a considerable depth below the surface, in the islands of 

 Pares and Antiparos."* We may here infer the existence of 

 an imperfectly metamorphosed flotz formation, if faith can be 

 yielded to the testimony of Origen, according to whom, the 

 ancient Eleatic, Xenophanes of Colophonf (who supposed the 

 whole earth's crust to have been once covered by the sea), de- 

 clared that marine fossils had been found in the quarries of 

 Syracuse, and the impression of a fish (a sardine) in the deepest 

 rocks of Pares. The Carrara or Luna marble quarries, which 

 constituted the principal source from which statuary marble 

 was derived even prior to the time of Augustus, and which 

 will probably continue to do so until the quarries of Pares 

 shall be reopened, are beds of calcareous sandstone — macigno 

 — altered by Plutonic action, and occurring in the insulated 

 mountain of Apuana, between gneiss-like mica and talcose 

 schist. $ Whether at some points granular limestone may 

 not have been formed in the interior of the earth, and been 

 raised by gneiss and syenite to the surface, where it forms 

 vein-like fissures,^ is a question on which I can not hazard 

 an opinion, owing to my own want of personal knowledge of 

 the subject. 



* Leop. vou Buch, Descr. des Canaries, p. 394 ; Fiedler, Reise durch 

 das Kdnigreich Griechenland, th. ii., s., 181, 190, mid 516. 



t I have previously alluded to the remarkable passage in Origen's 

 Philosopkumena, cap. 14 (Opera, ed. Delarue, t. i., p. 893). From the 

 whole context, it seems very improbable that Xenophanes meant an 

 impjiession of a laurel (tvttov dd<pvec) instead of an imi^ression of a fish 

 (tvttov acpvijg). Delarue is wrong in blaming the correction of Jacob 

 Gronovius in changing the laurel into a sardcl. The petrifaction of a 

 fish is also much more probable than the natural picture of Silenus, 

 which, according to Pliny (lib. xxxvi., 5), the quarry-men are stated to 

 have met with in Parian marble from Mount Marpessos. Servius ad 

 Virg., ^n., vi., 471. 



X On the geognostic relations of Carrara ( The City of the Moon, Strabo, 

 lib. v., p. 222), see Savi, Osservazioni sui terreni aniichi Toscani, ir 

 the Nuovo Giornale de^ Letterati di Pisa, and Hoffmann, in Karsten'» 

 Archiv fur Mineralogie, bd. vi., s. 258-263, as well as in his Geogn 

 Reise durch Italien, s. 244-265. 



§ According to the assumption of an excellent and very experiencec 

 observer, Karl von Leonhard. See his Jahrbtich fur Mineralogie, 1834 

 «. 329, and Bernhard Cotta, Geognosie, s. 310. 



