Page:Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st series, vol. 3.djvu/111

 evidence, often little better than conjectural, has guided sculptors and mineralogists in their attempts to determine the quarries from whence they were derived. Among these, the quarries of Paros afforded a marble (the often quoted lychnites of Pliny) in which it is asserted that the celebrated Venus was wrought, as well as some others to which we have not access. But there are many specimens of sculpture in the British Museum which seem to have been executed in this stone, or in one at least of analogous character.

Of the nature of the Parian marble we are enabled to speak positively, since some blocks of it have been quarried during the last few years, and are now to be found in the shops of the sculptors of this city. The grain of this marble is large and glistening, while at the same time its texture is loose and soft, and its colour of a yellowish and watery white. It possesses considerable translucency on the edges, a quality which, however desirable in statuary marble when of a fine grain, from the softness which it gives to the outline, only increases the disagreeable aspect of the Parian, by the angular reflections of light which take place on the pellucid edge and surface, from the innumerable faces of the small plates. The specimens of sculpture which I am about to quote, will exemplify this fault. It is certain indeed that the Greek sculptors abandoned the marble of Paros after the quarries of Luna and Carrara were discovered, the superior fineness and whiteness of these marbles which at present cause them to excel any with the places of which we are now acquainted, rendering them also at least equal to the best of those ancient ones of which the native places are now unknown.

Independently of the injurious effects which the large grain of the Parian marble produces on the transparent surface of sculptured works, and the false lights which it thus introduces into the contour, it interferes materially with the requisite correctness of drawing