At one early period of the geological history of the North American continent, all that portion now occupied by the Appalachian mountain system was sea bottom, and on it was being deposited not merely sediments washed down from the land, but, in favorable localities, deposits of lime, sand, and mud. This deposit went on, on a gradually sinking floor, for long ages, until the lowermost beds were buried under thousands of feet of the later formed materials. Then began the slow uplifting of the sea-bottom in the form of long, parallel folds to form the mountain ranges. During this uplifting the lime sediments, which are the only ones we need consider here, were changed to marbles, and have since been exposed and made available to the quarriers through the wearing-down action of rain and running streams. So, then, a quarry is but an excavation in the hardened mud formed on the bottom of a very ancient sea. In the Vermont marble region the beds are highly inclined and of varying colors. From the same quarry there may be produced pure white, gray, blue-gray, and greenish varieties, often variously veined and blotched owing to the collection of their different impurities along certain lines. Some of these quarries have been worked a depth of two hundred feet and more. Not all marble beds are upturned at this steep angle, however, nor have they been worked so deeply. In Georgia, the quarries are often in hillsides, extending scarcely at all, if any, below the surface of the ground. Where opened in the valley bottoms they have the form of huge rectangular pits, with perpendicular walls. In Tennessee, many of the sediments were so slightly changed that the fossil remains are still easily recognized, and the stone is of a pink or chocolate red color, owing to the abundance of iron. The marbles are quarried mainly by channeling machines, which cut out the stone in blocks of any desired size, or at least in sizes such as the nature of the beds will allow. Blasting is never resorted to in a properly managed quarry, since the shock of the explosion is likely to develop flaws in so tender a material. When freed from the quarry bed and brought to the surface the stone is sawn into the desired shapes by means of "reciprocating" blades of soft iron, the cutting material being sand, washed under the blades by small jets of water. The use to which any particular marble is put is governed largely by its price and color, though texture or grain often are taken into consideration. The coarsely crystalline white and white clouded marbles of southern New York, Maryland, and Georgia, are used almost wholly for building purposes; the pink and variegated marbles of Tennessee for interiors and for furniture; while the white and blue-grays of Vermont find a large market for interiors, cemetery work, tiling, and, to a much smaller extent, for building.