May 1, 1864.] THE TECHNOLOGIST. 



THE TECHNOLOGIST. 



ON GRANITE AND ITS USES. 



BY THE LATE PROFESSOR GEORGE WILSON. 



Granite looked at from a technological point of view, it is paradoxi- 

 cally remarkable as at once the most enduring and the most perishable 

 of rocks. One half of its industrial applications depends upon its 

 enduringness ; the other depends upon its perishableness. 



No hills are more grand and picturescpie than hills of granite. They 

 lift their stately heads, as we see in the mountain-peaks of Arran, high 

 up into the clear, cold air, and fear neither lightning nor storm. No 

 hills better deserve the name which the Hebrew poets loved to give to 

 mighty mountains — the everlasting hills. They are everlasting in the 

 sense of enduring as compared with the duration of man or his works. 

 In the lapse of 4000 years, nation after nation has been spoiled of the 

 earthly immortality which it promised itself, and only relics more 

 mournful than oblivion, reveal that it ever existed. Babylon has fallen, 

 Nineveh is a heap of ruins, Thebes a city of mummies, Athens an eye- 

 less skeleton, Rome an inhabited sepulchre, Jerusalem a thrice-ruined 

 temple : all, so far as man is concerned in the making of them, are 

 but the spectral shadows of what they were ; but if a map of Arran 

 had been made 4,000 years ago, it would in all its great features 

 represent what Arran is now. Nay, I think it not unlikely that 

 if Noah could return among us, he might show us the very valley 

 in Mount Ararat where the Ark rested. However that may be, if we 

 look to Palestine, Greece, Italy, or Egypt, so far as their natural features 

 are concerned, and compare the descriptions of them which have come 

 down to us from remote times with the present condition of their best 

 known regions, such as the Cataracts of the Nile, the mountains round 

 Jerusalem, the hills about Athens or the neighbourhood of Rome, the 

 difference is scarcely appreciable, provided we always exclude from con- 



VOL. IV. F F 



