Sir Gardner Wilkinson relates that he tried the edge of one of the Egyptian mason's chisels upon the very stone it had evidently been once used to cut, and found that its edge was turned directly; and therefore he wonders that such a tool could have been used for the purpose, of course supposing that the tool as he found it was just as the mason left it.

This, however, is not quite certain.

If we bury a brass tool in a damp place for a few weeks, it will be found to have undergone a curious molecular change, and to have become quite soft and weak, or, as the workmen call it, dead.

We ought to be quite sure whether lying for centimes under ground may not have made some similar change in bronze.
I have seen many prickly pears in different places, but never such specimens as those that were growing among the stones in this old quarry.

They had gnarled and knotted trunks of hard wood, and were as big as pollard-oaks; their age must have been immense; but, unfortunately, one could not measure it, or it would have been a good criterion of the age of the quarry, which had not only been excavated but abandoned before their time.