 ground, and are joined as if done by art; the points being convex and concave, and thereby lying one in another. These columns have five and six sides, a few of them seven; and a number of them nicely and exactly placed together make one large pillar from one foot to two in diameter. They are so nicely joined, that altho' they have five and six sides, as I before said, yet their contexture is so adapted, as to leave no vacuity between them; the prominent angles of one pillar fitting, and falling exactly into the hollows left them between two others, and the plain sides exactly answer to one another; so that those hexagons and pentagons of columnar marble appear as if finished by the hands of the most masterly

workmen. All the pillars stood exactly perpendicular to the plane of the horizon.
Doctor Foley, in the philosophical transactions, No. 212, speaking of the giants causeway, seems to think these wonderful pillars are composed of the common sort of craggy rock by the sea side: and the authors of the complete system of geography are of opinion, they resemble the lapis Basaltes; but some think they are a sort of marble. Now the truth is, the Basaltes of the antients is a very elegant and beautiful marble of a fine deep glossy black, like high polished steel, and is always found erect in the form of regular angular columns, composed of a number of joints, fitted together, and making pillars: so that where such pillars are seen, they are undoubtedly the columnar marble or touchstone of the antients. Dr. Hill, in his history of fossils, gives a good account of the nature of this body, and mentions several places it is to be found in; but seems not to have heard there was any of it among the northern mountains of our country.
This marble is one of the noblest productions of nature, and of all the fossil kingdom, the most astonishing body. If art is requisite for the formation of many things we see daily done with elegance and beauty; then certainly, mind itself, even the supreme mind, must have caused

such effects as these astonishing marble pillars; which lie in vast compound perpendicular columns at great depths in the earth, (none in beds of strata, like the other marbles), and rise in such beautiful joints and angles, well fitted together more than six and thirty foot above ground in some places. No other way could those wonderful productions have come into being, but by that intelligent, active power, who speaks intelligibly to every nation by his works
