Marble
a popular name for any limestone which is sufficiently hard to JEAN PAUL MARAT 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- MARBLEHEAD or as Da Costa does, there are: (1) Marbles of one plain color, which may be black, white, ash, gray, brown, red, yellow, 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 excellent marbles. For instance, the encrinital limestones of the Carboniferous formation have the fossils white in a dark gray or black matrix. Non-fossiliferous crystalline marbles, consisting of sedimentary calcareous strata, altered by metamorphism, also furnish good marbles. 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 Cañon of the Colorado is lined in many places with magnificent marble of various colors.
Elgin marbles, a collection of bassirilievi and fragments of statuary brought from the Parthenon at Athens to England by Lord Elgin in 1814. They were afterward purchased by the British Government, and are now in the British Museum. They consist chiefly of the metopes, representing for the most part the combats of the Centaurs and Lapithæ, 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 Nikê Apteros, a series of casts from the Temple of Theseus, and the choragic monument of Lysicrates.