Another feature in this remarkable design is to be traced in the ruins, and was much more plainly discoverable at an earlier, though still recorded and well-known, date: namely, the original painted adornment of the building, in strong primary colors. In the temples built of soft and rough stone, like that in [Plate I], there is known to have been a thin coat of fine plastering spread over the whole surface, and the final delicacy of curve and sharpness of edge must have been wrought in that plaster even more accurately than in the stone beneath. But in the Parthenon, built entirely of fine-grained and hard marble, no such coating was necessary, and the paint was applied directly to the crystalline surface itself. This painting covered very large parts of the exterior, nor is it probable that any single foot of the
