Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/681

Rh in our churchyards, where sandstones of this character have been used for pilasters and ornamental work, and where the stone set on its edge has peeled off in successive layers. In flagstones, which are merely thinly-bedded sandstones, this minuter lamination is fatal to durability. These stones, from the large size in which slabs of them can be obtained and from the ease with which they can be worked, form a tempting material for monumental inscriptions. The melancholy result of trusting to their permanence is strikingly shown by a tombstone at the end of the South Burying Ground in Greyfriars Churchyard. The date inscribed on it is 1841, and the lettering that remains is as sharp as if cut only recently. The stone weathers very little by surface disintegration. It is a laminated flagstone set on edge, and large portions have scaled off, leaving a rough, raw surface where the inscription once ran. In this instance a thickness of about one third of an inch has been removed in forty years.

In the third place, where a sandstone contains concretionary masses of different composition or texture from the main portion of the stone, these are apt to weather at a different rate. Sometimes they resist destruction better than the surrounding sandstone, so as to be left as prominent excrescences. More commonly they present less resistance, and are therefore hollowed out into irregular and often exceedingly fantastic shapes. Examples of this kind of weathering abound in our neighborhood. Perhaps the most curious to which a date can be assigned are to be found in the two sandstone pillars which until recently flanked the tomb of Principal Carstares in Greyfriars Churchyard. They were erected some time after the year 1715. Each of them is formed of a single block of stone about eight feet long. Exposure to the air for about one hundred and fifty years has allowed the original differences of texture or composition to make their influence apparent. Each is hollowed out for almost its entire length on the exposed side into a trough four to six inches deep and six to eight inches broad. As they lean against the wall beneath the new pillars which have supplanted them, they suggest some rude form of canoe rather than portions of a sepulchral monument.

Where concretions are of a pyritous kind, their decomposition gives rise to sulphuric acid, some of which combines with the iron and gives rise to dark stains upon the corroded surface of the stone. Some of the sandstones of this district, full of such impurities, ought never to be employed for architectural purposes. Every block of stone in which they occur should be unhesitatingly condemned. Want of attention to this obvious rule has led to the unsightly disfigurement of public buildings.

III. —In Professor Pfaff's experiments, to which I have already referred, he employed plates of syenite and granite, both rough and polished. He found that they had all lost slightly in weight at the end of a year. The annual rate of loss was estimated by him as equal