!<?02 CRETACEOUS ROCKS OF S. INDIA. [PaRT III 



Building-Stones, Road-metalling, <&c. Of the various stones I have 

 enumerated, all perhaps are used more or less for building, and for 



Employment of build- ^^^ manufacture of rice, or paddy mortars,* water 

 ing stone by natives. troughs, and similar household utensils. The only 



buildings, properly so called, for which stone is employed by the 

 natives, are the lower portions of the large native temples, for which 

 gneiss alone is used, whatever be their situation; and the small village 

 kovils and chuttrums (or native rest houses,) which are constructed 

 usually of the stone nearest at hand : on the Cretaceous rocks generally 

 of some form of limestone. A large quantity of roughly hewn stone 

 is also employed by the natives for revetting the inner slope of the 

 larger tank bunds, and for constructing the kalingulas, or waste- 

 water channels, as well as for walling the large rectangular irri'^a- 

 tion wells or bowries (when sunk in loose ground). Rough stone- 

 causeways are also met with in some villages for the purpose of 

 affording a dr}' footway, when, after heavy rain, the usual roads are 

 cut up into an almost impassable morass by the passage of carts 

 and the flocks of buffaloes, cattle, goats, and sheep, which form the 

 chief wealth of the agricultural population. 



The method of quarrying employed by the natives is the same. 



Native method of whatever be the nature of the stone. Gunpow- 

 quanymg. ^^^ ^^ never used except in quarries opened by 



Europeans, as e. g. those lately worked in the gneiss at Penmullay, near 

 Trichinopoly, for the supply of the Railway works. The stone is detached 

 by large iron wedges driven by a heavy stone mallet, (see Fig. 21,) 

 into a line of holes previously cut with the gavel and chisel ; and 

 the block then raised by a crowbar, due advantage being taken of 

 the planes of bedding or jointing. By this means blocks of 5 or 6 



* The mortars in which rice, or paddy, is pounded in order to fixe it fi-oni the husk. In 

 Southern India a wooden or stone mortar is used for this pui-pose, the pestle being a 

 pole about 5 feet in length, shod with iron. 



