ges, a chisel, and a heavy hammer. A single workman can detach a
mass fifteen or twenty feet long, by merely drilling a row of holes, a
couple of inches deep, and three or four inches apart, along the
surface, in the direction in which he wishes to split the rock, and then
inserting wedges into each of these holes, and striking them,
consecutively, with small, light, repeated blows along the whole row.
The granite rends, at last, along the line, quite evenly, requiring very
little chiselling afterwards to give the block a smooth face.

Sec. 17. This after-chiselling, however, is necessarily tedious work, and
therefore that condition of speckled color, which is beautiful if
exhibited in broad masses, but offensive in delicate forms, exactly
falls in with the conditions of _possible_ sculpture. Not only is it
more laborious to carve granite delicately, than a softer rock; but it
is physically impossible to bring it into certain refinements of form.
It cannot be scraped and touched into contours, as marble can; it must
be struck hard, or it will not yield at all; and to strike a delicate
and detached form hard, is to break it. The detached fingers of a
delicate hand, for instance, cannot, as far as I know, be cut in
granite. The smallest portion could not be removed from them without a
strength of blow which would break off the finger. Hence the sculptor of
granite is forced to confine himself to, and to seek for, certain types
of form capable of expression in his material; he is naturally driven to
make his figures simple in surface, and colossal in size, that they may
bear his blows; and this simplicity and magnitude are exactly the
characters necessary to show the granitic or porphyritic color to the
best advantage. And thus we are guided, almost forced, by the laws of
nature, to do right in art. Had granite been white, and marble speckled
(and why should this not have been, but by the definite Divine
appointment for the good of man?), the huge figures of the Egyptian
would have been as oppressive to the sight as cliffs of snow, and the
Venus de Medicis would have looked like some exquisitely graceful
species of frog.

Their third characteristic. _Purity in decomposition._

Sec. 18. The third universal characteristic of these rocks is their
decomposition into the purest sand and clay. Some of them decompose
spontaneously, though slowly, on exposure to weather; the greater number
only after being mechanically pulve