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Updated: May 22, 2025
Hence it is found desirable to shape the stones which are to be used in architecture while they are yet soft and wet, and while they contain their "quarry-water," as it is called; also to break up stone intended for roads when soft, and then leave it to dry in the air for months that it may harden.
The subsoil is laterite, also highly ferruginous. Soft and working well with the axe while it retains the quarry-water, it soon hardens by exposure; and, thus weathered, it forms the best and ugliest of the local building materials. Embedded in the earth's surface are blocks and boulders apparently erratic, dislodged or washed down from the upper heights, where similar masses are seen.
Observations of this kind led Kuhlman to investigate the cause, and he believes that the hardening of rocks is not owing solely to the evaporation of quarry-water, but that it depends upon the tendency which all earthy matters possess to undergo a spontaneous crystallization by slow dessication, which commences the moment the rock is exposed to the air.
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