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APPENDIX B. 
[By Wm. Smith.] 
FREESTONE. 
The Hackness Stone is a fine-grained silicious Freestone chiefly 
of a mellow brownish yellow colour, or what is commonly called a 
good stone colour. Rubbed and finely jointed this stone presents a 
smooth surface and a most agreeable appearance in passages, halls, 
etc., and externally in fronts of Houses Churches and other public 
buildings is unequalled in colour and beauty of ornamental work. 
Hackness Hall built of this stone thirty years since * is a proof of 
its good quahties. The stone being naturally dry and unabsorbent of 
moisture neither suffers by damp from the earth or by exposure to 
sun rain or frost nor does it moulder in sheltered places under 
cornices, like many other of the soft freestones. 
It is not essentially necessary that this stone should be placed in 
its bed — stones for columns 12 or 15 feet or more in length may be 
raised from beds 2 to 5 feet in thickness. 
When raised from the quarry this stone is soft but hardens by 
exposure, works free and tough with any kind of tools receives and 
preserves the finest arriss of any stone in use may be turned and carved 
into the finest kind of ornamental work required, which by specimens 
thereof in Hackness Hall appear likely ever to retain their form and 
sharpness. 
BUILDING STONE. 
A hard compact silicious stone even in texture and free from 
extraneous matter, of Httle but uniform colour, brownish white — neither 
splits scales or moulders by the longest exposure — capable of being 
wrought with a pick, point, or chisel, rubs down to a good surface 
for steps and other purposes ; and though hard this stone requires 
but Uttle working from the great facihty of cleaving it either in or 
across the bed. 
Four or five feet of the upper part of the rock is sufficiently 
* Hackness Hall was built in 1805, so that the date of this note 
would be 1835 or so, a little before Smith died. His last work was in 
connection with the Commission re Building Stone for the new Houses 
of Parliament. — T.S. 
