Page:Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st series, vol. 3.djvu/119

 and the advantages derived from lower freight duty and insurance. Such are the difficulties which oppose the introduction of the most perfect marble which has yet been found in Britain, difficulties which, slight as they are, ought, together with the prevalence of established habits and of a commercial routine, to check the extravagant hopes which have been entertained in this country of superseding by its own produce the importation of foreign statuary marble. But it will not be rendering justice to the marble of Sky if I do not add, that it possesses a property not found in that of Carrara, and one of considerable importance, at least in small sculptures. This is, that compactness of texture by which it resists the bruise which so often takes place in marble at the point where the chisel stops, an effect known to sculptors by the technical term stunning, and of which the result is a disagreeable opake white mark, generally in the very place where the deepest shadow is wanted.

I have little to add respecting the marble of Glen Tilt, as I have spoken of it in another place. Except the somewhat larger size of its grain, it is scarcely to be distinguished from the Pentelic: in colour it is precisely similar; but as the character and defects of the Pentelic, which I have already given, are equally applicable to this variety, we may fairly abandon all hope of rendering it useful in the art of sculpture.