THE TECHNOLOGIST. [May 1, 186 



434 ON GRANITE AND ITS USES. 



sideration the effect of earthquakes and volcanoes, which is in truth 

 exceptional, and that of man, which, after all, goes for very little. 



The granite hills are everlasting also, as tried by standards which can 

 find no place for a thing so fleeting as a generation of men. Napoleon 

 told his soldiers in the plains of Egypt that forty centuries looked down 

 on them from the summits of the Pyramids ; but the stones of the 

 Pyramids, which are older by uncounted centuries than Adam, were not 

 born when there were granite mountains hoary with age. And we may 

 possibly form a faintly imperfect conception of the antiquity^ of some of 

 those rocks, if we consider that in all probability more than one of the 

 stars are younger than they. At all events, during incalculable periods 

 they have gazed into the abysses of space ; and the mightiest, perhaps, 

 of the events of the universe were not transacted till millions of years 

 after those ancient monarchs first wore upon their brows their crowns of 

 snow. 



They are everlasting, finally, in the sense of renewing themselves in 

 the only way created things can, namely, by the birth of successive 

 generations ; so that, whilst certain of the granite hills are unimaginably 

 old, others have arisen from the fertile depths below within geologically 

 recent times, and have witnessed at least the dawn of the historic period, 

 and the last stages through which the earth passed before it was made 

 ready for man. 



But what have those relations of granite rocks to do with technology 

 and industrial science ? They affect it thus. The enduringness of the 

 granite mountains belongs to the blocks cut out of them, down even to 

 the smallest fragments. No material, accordingly, is so suitable for 

 buildings or erections which are to be very lasting. The air can rust 

 nothing out of granite blocks ; rain can dissolve nothing out of them ; 

 rivers even may flow in granite-beds for miles without ceasing to be soft 

 *—i. e., unimpregnated with saline matter. Frost has little power to split 

 them ; their component particles are bound together by a strong co- 

 hesion ; plants do not readily grow on them ; they remain undiscoloured 

 for ages. In proof of this, we have the obelisks of the ancient Egyptians, 

 still standing like detached peaks of granite hills. Those obelisks, not 

 only beneath the serene atmosphere of Egypt, but after transference to 

 the capitals of Western and Northern Europe, display, uneffaced, un- 

 blunted even, the hieroglyphics which were cut upon them three 

 thousand years ago. In the British Museum most readers have probably 

 seen granite sarcophagi and colossal figures, which might have come 

 from the sculptor's hand yesterday. Those good qualities, however, are 

 necessarily accompanied by a corresponding difficulty in quarrying and 

 carving the stone, and thus a large demand is made on the ingenuity, 

 skill, and patience of the stone-cutter. Into this I will not minutely 

 enter ; but you can readily understand that the employment of gun- 

 powder to blast granite rocks ; the slow process of boring holes in them ; 

 the tedious driving of wedges into these holes ; the rougher dressings by 



