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inated. There are red, purple, and green varieties, which are highly esteemed as marbles. Porphyry shell (Zoöl.), a handsome marine gastropod shell (Oliva porphyria), having a dark red or brown polished surface, marked with light spots, like porphyry.

Enneads, the title given to the works of the philosopher Plotinus, published by his pupil Porphyry; -- so called because each of the six books into which it is divided contains nine chapters.

nous matrix or ground mass, as distinguished from well-defined crystals; as, the magma of porphyry.

e use and appearance, as serpentine or verd antique marble, and less properly to polished porphyry, granite, etc.

A greenish spotted porphyry, being a diabase whose pyroxene has been altered to uralite; -- first found in the Pyreness. So called from the colored spots which give it a mottled appearance. -- O*phi"ic, a.

One of the prominent embedded crystals of a porphyry.

c heat and other subterranean forces under pressure. -- Plutonic rocks (Geol.), granite, porphyry, and some other igneous rocks, supposed to have consolidated from a melted state at a great depth from the surface. Cf. Intrusive rocks, under Intrusive. -- Plutonic theory. (Geol.) See Plutonism.

Porphyry. [Obs.] Locke.

Relating to, or resembling, porphyry, that is, characterized by the presence of distinct crystals, as of feldspar, quartz, or augite, in a relatively fine-grained base, often aphanitic or cryptocrystalline.

To cause to resemble porphyry; to make spotted in composition, like porphyry.

In Egyptian art, an image of granite or porphyry, having a human head, or the head of a ram or of a hawk, upon the wingless body of a lion. The awful ruins of the days of old . . . Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphinx. Shelley.

To touch; to act by appulse. Hinder light but from striking on it [porphyry], and its colors vanish. Locke.

Not stratified; -- applied to massive rocks, as granite, porphyry, etc., and also to deposits of loose material, as the glacial till, which occur in masses without layers or strata.

A green porphyry called oriental verd antique.