BUILDING AND ORNAMENTAL STONES. 389 



Several outcrops of marble occur in Middlebury, ami which have been 

 worked for many years past; but in consequence of the thinness of the 

 beds, their badly-pointed structure, and the interstratification of a mag- 

 nesian state that i>roduces numerous " rising seams," it is quite difficult 

 to obtain perfectly sound blocks of large size.* 



The quarries in Dorset are situated mostly upon the sides of Mount 

 Eolus, or Dorset Mountain, as it is also called, a section of which (after 

 Hitchcock) is here given. 



The thickness of the slaty cap rock is estimated by Ilitchcock at 408 

 feet, and the various beds of limestone below at 1,070 feet. Although 

 but a small portion of this is suitable for quarrying, still the supply is 

 readily seen to be inexhaustible. The prevailing colors of the stone, as 

 at Butland, are white and bluish, variously mottled and veined. Ac- 

 cording to Professor Seelyt the first quarry opened in Dorset was by 

 Isaac Underbill, in 1785; the stone being used chiefly for fire jambs, 

 chimney-backs, etc. The first marble grave-stones ever furnished here 

 were the work of Jonas Stewart, in 1700. 



The bed of primordial rock known to geologists as the " red sand- 

 rock," which occur in the. northwestern part of the State, bordering on 

 Lake Champlain, is, as a rule, a hard, dark-red sandstone, containing 

 some 8 or per cent, of potash, with about the same amounts of iron 

 and lime. The entire formation, which is some 2,000 feet in thickness, 

 is, however, by no means uniform in composition, but includes consid- 

 erable beds of limestone, dolomite, slate, and shale. It is the dolomitic 

 layer which furnishes the peculiar red- and- white mottled stone popu- 

 larly known as Winooski marble. According to a writer in the Amer- 

 ican Naturalist, % the beds of this marble appear first one or two miles 

 north of Burlington and extend in a somewhat interrupted series north 

 through Saint Albans, and end between that place and Swan ton. More 

 Mian thirty years ago a quarry was opened in this rock about miles 

 from Burlington, but owing to the hardness of the stone the enter- 

 prise proved a failure and the quarries were abandoned. Later quarries 

 were opened at Saint Albans, and still more recently were re-opened at 

 Burlington, the stone being used largely for flooring-tiles, wainscot, 

 ings, and general interior decorative work. As a rule the stone is crys- 

 talline and very hard, much harder than ordinary marble. Its color is 



* Geology of Vermont, Vol. II, p. 709. 



t Op. cit, p. 30. 



X George IT. Perkins, American Naturalist, Feb., 1881. 



