six years before the State was admitted into the Union, and it is still owned by the descendants of the original proprietors. This discovery was the great sensation of the day. People came hundreds of miles to get the crude slabs for fire-place stones and other domestic uses, and a brisk traffic | in the new commodity soon sprang up. In 1808 a second quarry was opened, and subsequently many others, following in rapid succession. All but two of these are still in operation. The channelling process, now familiar to mining engineers, was introduced in 1841; the first derrick for hoisting the blocks in 1848; the first tunnelling in 1859. In 1818 the first attempt at sawing marble was made, but it was many years before the experiment proved successful. For a long time after these works were opened they had little competition, and the demand for their products far exceeded the supply; but the trade was subsequently injured by the introduction of Italian marbles, and the discovery of other Vermont quarries, especially those near Rutland.

Of this town, Rutland, some patriarch who should die now might say that he found it brick or frame and left it marble. The chaste, cold, glossy stone is almost oppressively plenty in this smart and thriving village, and meets the eye in a multitude of forms and uses-buildings, pavements, walls, besides interior decoration and finishing. Rutland is in fact the best advertisement of its own leading | industry. To use the language of the exchange, its principal capitalists are already “in marble" before their death, and without the aid of the sculptor. Concerns like the Vermont Marble Company, Sheldon and Slason, Flint Brothers, Ripley and Sons, Gilson and Woodfin, and others, with their fifteen or twenty quarries, give an idea of the extent to which the marble interest engrosses the capacity and the resources of this neighborhood.

The more important quarries and works are situated north and west of the town itself, at Centre Rutland, West Rutland, Sutherland Falls, and lesser points in the vicinity. The Vermont Marble Company is, in fact, domiciled at all three of these places. It has finishing-works at Centre Rutland, quarries at West Rutland, and both quarries and mills at Sutherland Falls. At the first-named point no marble is excavated, but there is a splendid waterpower, which naturally is not neglected,

and here one can observe every stage in the process except the quarrying itself. The marble is brought to the mills in massive cubes, is sawed, turned, chiselled, polished, mounted, and emerges as tombstones, capitals, cornices, columns, mantelpieces, and table-tops. Much of this work, especially the hand-work, can, of course, be studied in every place where people die and have monuments set up by the local stone-cutter over their graves, but the heavier preliminary labor is best to be seen near the quarries themselves.

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The marble is delivered at the mills in elongated cubes-parallelopipeds, I suppose Euclid would say-from ten to fifteen feet long and three to five feet square, and placed on the frames for sawing. An expert will then decide as to the manner of reduction, that is, the thickness and number of the slabs, according to the quality, the shape and size of the block, or the special nature of the orders to be filled. In outward appearance a gang," as a set of saws is called, resembles the old-fashioned upright saw-mill, except that the vertical frame contains not one but many saws, arranged at different intervals, corresponding to the desired thickness of the cuts. One process, therefore, divides an entire block into slabs. The saw has, it should be added, no teeth. The cutting is the joint effect of the hard edge of the steel blade and the wet sand which is fed into the opening, and thus produces an incisive friction. The ordinary progress is about two and a half inches an hour, and the gangs work night and day. The polishing of small pieces is done on a revolving iron disk some twelve feet in diameter. The marble is thrown upon this, and caught by fixed wooden strips like the radii of a circle, while the motion of the wheel, which is supplied with sand and water, furnishes the attrition. It takes two or three hours to polish a surface down one inch. Heavy pieces are smoothed by hand, with the aid of pumice-stone. Marble is turned into circular shapes in a lathe, exactly like iron, and is bored with an ordinary dry drill.

The West Rutland quarries are not, like those of Dorset, in the side of a great mountain, but seem to form the bed of a low hill or ridge rising very little above a level. The excavations follow, therefore, nearly vertical lines directly into the earth; and the cuts themselves, which are shaped to the seams of the stone, have at the sur

face an eastward inclination of about forty degrees, then of sixty, and again of twenty, until in some places they are almost perpendicular. The cuts are marked off from fifty to seventy feet long, twelve to sixteen feet wide, and about four feet deep, and are afterward subdivided into desired or convenient sizes. Some of this work, under ledges and in close quarters, is still necessarily done by hand; but the substitution of machinery for manual labor is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in a Vermont marble quarry. Three of the machines thus used may be described. For the diamond borer or drill the power is steam, and the work is done by two drills terminating in diamond points about one foot apart. By going frequently over the course a close line of holes is formed, not unlike the perforated division between postage stamps, and as the instrument works with great rapidity, it makes a cut one foot deep and seventy-five feet long in one day. It can be adjusted to any angle near the perpendicular, and is used for upright drilling. Another machine, the Wardwell, for vertical work, is a spe

A MARBLE QUARRY.

cies of locomotive on a track, along which it moves backward and forward, and makes complete cuts by means of systems of chisels acting on the trip-hammer principle. There are two of these, four or five feet apart, and both sides of a block are therefore cut at once. The horizontal cut is made by the Ingersoll drill. It is a small instrument hanging and movable on a fixed cylinder, and adjustable there to an angle either above or below the horizontal. The power is supplied in the form of steam in rubber pipes. Besides

man.

The final rupture between a block and its ancient bed is an interesting process. Let us suppose the two cuts to be made, one nearly vertical, and the other, or horizontal one, at right angles to it, and both one or two feet deep. A series of wedges is then inserted into the openings, and a man with a heavy hammer goes along tapping them lightly one after another.

sharply for the effect, the crack gradually widens, the great mass of stone begins to heave and swell under the strain, the quick ear of the experts detects the critical moment, and a simultaneous blow on all the wedges throws the monster loose. Now and then, of course, a failure is made, and a block splits in two. But the judgment of the workmen is singularly correct, and the block is generally thrown out in its full integrity.

At West Rutland there are half a dozen or more quarries belonging to as many