_Modern marbles._--1. British. Black marble is found at Ashford,
Matlock, and Monsaldale in Derbyshire; black and white in the north part
of Devonshire; the variegated marbles of Devonshire are generally
reddish, brownish, and grayish, variously veined with white and yellow,
or the colours are often intimately blended; the marbles from Torbay and
Babbacombe, display a great variety in the mixture of their colours; the
Plymouth marble is either ash-coloured with black veins, or
blackish-gray and white, shaded with black veins; the cliffs near
Marychurch exhibit marble quarries not only of great extent, but of
superior beauty to any other in Devonshire, being either of a
dove-coloured ground with reddish-purple and yellow veins, or of a black
ground mottled with purplish globules. The green marble of Anglesea is
not unlike the _verde antico_; its colours being greenish-black,
leek-green, and sometimes dull purplish, irregularly blended with white.
The white part is limestone, the green shades proceed from serpentine
and asbestos. There are several fine varieties of marble in Derbyshire;
the mottled-gray in the neighbourhood of Moneyash, the light gray being
rendered extremely beautiful by the number of purple veins which spread
upon its polished surface in elegant irregular branches; but its chief
ornament is the multitude of _entrochi_, with which this transition
limestone-marble abounds. Much of the transition and carboniferous
limestone of Wales and Westmoreland is capable of being worked up into
agreeable dark marbles.