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Marble

Non-foliated, metamorphosed limestone which is produced by recrystallization and is hard enough to take a polish. The hardest and most attractive marbles have been used in statuary and for building since antiquity and are still quarried, e.g. from the Carrara quarry which supplied Michelangelo. The statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC, is made from marble quarried in Georgia, USA. Marbles may be variously coloured or banded, depending on their chemical and mineralogical composition (mostly calcite), e.g. Carrara marble is pure white, but Siena marble, quarried in Tuscany, has red mottling. — A Dictionary of Geology and Earth Sciences (4 ed.), Oxford University Press

size: around 6 cm

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