MARBLE, a popular name for any limestone which is sufficiently hard to take a fine polish. Any calcareous or even any other rock which takes a good polish and is suitable for decorative or architectural purposes. Arranged by col or as Da Costa does, there are: (1) Marbles of one plain color, which may be black, white, ash, gray, brown, red, yel low, blue, or green; (2) Marbles of two colors, which are simply the foregoing marbles variegated with other colors; (3) Marbles variegated with many colors; and (4) Marbles containing shells, corals, and other extraneous bodies. Some of the fossiliferous limestones furnish ex cellent marbles. For instance, the encri nital limestones of the Carboniferous for mation have the fossils white in a dark gray or black matrix. Non-fossiliferous crystalline marbles, consisting of sedi mentary calcareous strata, altered by metamorphism, also furnish good mar bles. The statuary marble of Italy may be of this character. The purest kinds are used for statues, those less pure as building material. The Carrara and
Parian marbles are of this type. Other marbles are the Verd Antique, the Fire Marble or Lumachelle, the Giallo Antico, Madreporic Marble, etc. The Grand Cafion of the Colorado is lined in many places with magnificent marble of vari ous colors.
Elgin marbles, a collection of bassi rilievi and fragments of statuary brought from the Parthenon at Athens to Eng land by Lord Elgin in 1814. They were afterward purchased by the British Gov ernment, and are now in the British Museum. They consist chiefly of the metopes, representing for the most part the combats of the Centaurs and La pith r, and the statues of fragments of statues which ornamented the tympana of the pediments of the Parthenon, or Temple of Minerva. To those were added the frieze from the Temple of Nike Apteros, a series of casts from the Temple of Theseus, and the ehoragic monument of Lysicrates.