IN SOUTHERN INDIA. 



293 



induced a well-known Madras merchant, Mr. A. J. Byard, to 

 consider the question commercially, and the inquiries and 

 calculations made showed that it would not pay to attempt 

 smelting the ore either by importing coal and carrying it up 

 to Salem, or by carrying the ore down to Madras to meet the 

 coal. Whether circumstances have so changed that what 

 seemed hopeless in 1862 should promise in 1882 to be a 

 speculation worth trying is a question to be decided by com- 

 mercial and metallurgical experts. There are many other 

 difficulties to be solved beside the mere cost of fuel, and fore- 

 most among them is the nature of the flux required to be used 

 and whether it can be readily and cheaply procured. Enor- 

 mously rich as Salem District is in iron ore, the present 

 outlook does not appear favorable to its being made available. 



Of the vast variety of mere building stones, nothing special 

 needbesaid. The gneissic rocks have furnished the bulk of the 

 stone used in building all the greatest temples in South India, 

 and in many cases as Chellumbrum, Tiruvellur, Manargudi, 

 and Tan j ore, lying far away in the alluvial flats of the 

 Cauvery delta, enormous cost must have been incurred in merely 

 carrying the stone from the quarries. The enormous mono- 

 liths carried to Tanjore, the great bull and the cap stone of 

 the great gopuram of the famous Siva temple, and the huge 

 slab on which stands Chantrey's statue of the late Raja of 

 Tanjore, in one of the Durbar halls in the palace, were in all 

 probability obtained from a quarry of massive syenitoid 

 hornblende rock at the foot of the Patchamallai mountains 

 near Perambalur, a distance of not less than 45 miles. 



Captain Newbold in his summary draws attention to the 

 extreme rarity of crystalline limestones among the metamor- 

 phic rocks of the south. He would have qualified this remark 

 greatly had he been acquainted with the very important and 

 extensive beds found by Mr. King and the author in 

 Coimbatore, Trichinopoly, and Salem Districts, to the south and 



