514 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



In Boyle Abbey, Co. Roscommon, the stone shows excellent 

 work; it is also durable, as in places it still retains the tool 

 markings. 



[In America, and also in England, many stones, even when in the quarry, are 

 sawn, or otherwise worked and sculptured by machinery ; very little work, however, 

 of this kind goes on in Ireland. In some workshops there is sawing and planing ; but 

 there does not seem to be a quarry in which the stones are cut in situ : while if a 

 building is in progress you generally hear the hammer and chisel, and not the saw or 

 plane, at work. However, saws, at least, were known to the early Irish builder as 

 in many of the ancient structures the stones, especially sandstones, were sawn, not 

 chiselled. The only instance that I can learn of saws being used to cut stone in situ, 

 was in the Angliham marble quarry, Co. Galway, where, somewhere about the year 

 1860, Mr. Abbott erected a sawing-frame and engine; but when the block was about 

 half cut through, the saws broke off, leaving, as Mr. Sibthorpe points out, a puzzleite 

 for future geologists to explain how parallel narrow seams of oxide of iron occur in 

 the blocks.] 



On reviewing the records of the different Counties, it is con- 

 spicuous in how many places the sandstones or conglomerates were 

 wrought into millstones. In some places there was a large trade 

 not only for home but also for English uses. This trade, how- 

 ever, seems to be altogether a thing of the past, as nowhere, 

 as far as we can learn, is it now followed. The manufacture of 

 stones for flax-crushing necessarily died out when the new modes 

 of crushing, or manipulating, were introduced ; but the decline in 

 the demand for corn millstones seems to have been solely due to 

 the repeal of the Corn Laws, which starved out the industry, and 

 caused it to be abandoned. Since then the few stones required are 

 imported, principally from France. At the once famous quarries 

 of Drumdowney, Co. Kilkenny, there has not been wrought a 

 pair of stones since 1875, and then only one pair. 



To some of the good class sandstones not now in request, as those 

 near Thurles and Dundrum, Co. Tipperary ; Doon, Co. Limerick ; 

 and others mentioned hereafter ; public attention may be specially 

 directed. 



["When the modern sandstone buildings are tabulated, it at first appears remarkable 

 that so many, even in towns at great distances from one another, are all built of stones 

 from one quarry. On inquiry, this appears to be due to their having been built by one 

 contractor, or under the orders of one architect, the [contractor or architect having an 

 interest in, or liking for, a certain stone. In Dublin, many of the recent Insurance 

 < tffices have in them the same stones, they all having been built by the one contractor. 

 Lut this is more conspicuous in the country towns, especially in the Banks — as the 



