370 ARTIFICIAL STONE MANUFACTURE. 
crops out and rises abruptly in some places above the surface of the 
ground. In examples where the progress of things render their removal 
necessary, blasting with gunpowder is the more economical process of 
manipulation, and even then the walls could be broken down and re- 
moved at less expense of money and at a still more reduced outlay of 
labour, had they been hewn out of the solid rock, owing to the peculiar 
toughness and tenacity and total absence of stratification or cleavage pro- 
perties of the concrete ; for with a sledge-hammer, you may pound it 
into dust, but you cannot split it up into fragments of a size easily to be 
handled. 
In erecting such buildings, the Picts are said to have set their con- 
crete in moulds ; indeed, many of the walls still standing bear legible 
evidence of this method of building. 
Agricultural buildings, from their plain and simple style of archi- 
tecture, and also fences, are favourably adapted for this plan of building, 
and just now, when strikes among the building trades and the conduct 
of tradespeople generally ; together with the extra expenses attending 
trade combinations — renders it difficult for landowners to erect home- 
steads, labourers' cottages, and fences on terms that will enable tenants 
to pay fair interest on capital thus invested — cannot the work of mould- 
ing concrete walls be greatly abridged and expedited by means of ma- 
chinery and the advances recently made in this branch of chemistry ? 
Now, for example, when we can by dint of discoveries in chemistry con- 
vert chalk into marble over night while our workmen are sleeping, and 
the drifting sand into a hard conglomerate sandstone or Bathstone, &c, 
of any colour, cannot we teach our portable steam-engines the art of 
building, so as to erect homesteads and cottages by the hundreds, and 
fences by the running mile, in a twinkling, and at no expense, compara- 
tively speaking? 
We are evidently fast approaching a period when experience will 
give an affirmative answer to the above interrogatory, thereby advanc- 
ing the wages of those employed in this branch of industry — indirectly 
in the construction of machinery, and directly in using such machinery, 
at the same time greatly reducing the expenses of building, and increas- 
ing the health and comfort of man and beast, as occupants ; houses thus 
built being much more healthy than the vast majority of the ginger- 
bread structures now erected. The present buildings are not only ex- 
pensive in a pecuniary sense, and of short duration, but they are also 
unhealthy, as compared with the more solid and permanent examples of 
PictLsh masonry ; and although the concrete style of the latter was plain 
and rude to outward appearance, yet we aver that the finest style of 
architecture can be affected by the moulding concrete and infiltration 
processes, and at less money than the current terms of this quality of 
workmanship ; for it is already a well-established fact that the artificial 
stone in question takes the highest polish, and is susceptible of being 
