STONE AND MARBLE QUARRYING.

By many geologists granite is supposed to be the oldest of mineral formations, and in various parts of America is found in abundance. The quarries of Maine are prodigious; New Hampshire is well known as the "Granite State;" Connecticut and New York abound with it; and the areas worked in different localities of Massachusetts yield almost incalculable supplies, even Quincy, known in this line for nearly a hundred years, still active as ever in her native industry, sending off at times blocks or columns for, building or monumental purposes weighing three hundred tons each. Penobscot Bay, Me., has contributed its material to the erection of some of the most important structures in the country; and at one point of Hurricane Island there is presented a solid mass of one hundred acres of clear granite, reaching more than one hundred and fifty feet above the sea. But not only granite of the most enduring quality and general excellence is found from Maine to Virginia, but also some of the finest marbles in the world, the white and colored varieties as well, and adapted to building and statuary uses equally with the choicest imported article. Vermont quarries, as also New York, the Potomac, Tennessee, etc., can hardly be excelled in this line. But even in the furthermost portions of the Pacific and the Northwest, Nature's treasures of stone, marble, slate, and geological formations peculiar to the locality, and capable of utilization for structural purposes, are constantly coming to light, so that the West is likely to vie with the East, more and more, in the abundance and excellence, of its building resources.