In the majority of cases superficial solution has been retarded by the formation of a peculiar gray or begrimed crust, to be immediately described. The marble employed here for monumental slabs appears to be peculiarly liable to the development of this crust. Another kind of white marble, sometimes employed for sculptured ornaments on tombstones, dissolves without crust. It is snowy white, and more translucent than the ordinary marble. So far as the few weathered specimens I have seen enable me to judge, it appears to be either Carrara marble or one of the strongly saccharoid, somewhat translucent varieties employed instead of it. This stone, however, though it forms no crust, suffers marked superficial solution. But it escapes the internal disintegration which, so far as I have observed, is always an accompaniment of the crust. But the few examples of it I have met with hardly suffice for any comparison between the varieties.
2. Internal Disintegration.—Many of the marble monuments in our older churchyards are covered with a dirty crust, beneath which the stone is found on examination to be merely a loose, crumbling sand. This crust seems to form chiefly where superficial solution is feeble. It may be observed to crack into a polygonal network, the individual polygons occasionally curling up so as to reveal the yellowish-white crumbling material underneath. It also rises in blisters, which, when they break, expose the interior to rapid disintegration.
So long as this begrimed film lasts unbroken the smooth face of the marble slab remains with apparently little modification. The inscription may be perfectly legible; the moment the crust is broken up, however, the decay of the stone is rapid. For we then see that the cohesion of the individual crystalline granules of the marble has already been destroyed, and that the merest touch causes them to crumble into a loose sand.
It appears, therefore, that two changes take place in upright marble slabs freely exposed to rain in our burial-grounds—a superficial, more or less firm crust is formed, and the cohesion of the particles beneath is destroyed.
The crust varies in color from a dirty gray to a deep brown-black, and in thickness from that of writing-paper up to sometimes at least a millimetre. One of the most characteristic examples of it was obtained from an utterly decayed tomb (erected in the year 1792), on the east side of Canongate Churchyard. No one would suppose that the pieces of flat dark stone lying there on the sandstone plinth were once portions of white marble. Yet a mere touch suffices to break the black crust, and the stone at once crumbles to powder. Nevertheless, the two opposite faces of the original polished slab have been preserved, and I even found the sharply-chiseled socket-hole of one of the retaining nails. The specimen was carefully removed and soaked in a solution of gum, so as to preserve it from disintegration. On submitting the crust of the marble to microscopic investigation, I found it to consist
