Crossword-Solution: EXFOLIATE 9 letters, 10 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 19

The mountains of gneiss-granite are to a remarkable degree abruptly conical, which seems caused by the rock tending to exfoliate in thick, conically concentric layers: these peaks resemble in shape those of phonolite and other injected rocks on volcanic islands; nor is the grain or foliation (as we shall afterwards see) any difficulty on the idea of the gneiss-granite having been an intrusive rather than a metamorphic formation.

How long are these expected to remain legible? They employ the same material for their buildings, and I observe that the older monuments last, on the whole, better than the new ones, which flake away rapidly--exfoliate or crack, according to the direction from which the grain of the rock has been attacked by the chisel.

Hunter has observed, that where a dead piece of bone is to exfoliate, or to separate from a living one, that the dead part does not putrify, but remains perfectly sound, while the surface of the living part of the bone, which is in contact with the dead part, becomes absorbed, and thus effects its separation.

There is a tendency to exfoliate parallel to the exposed or worked surface, in all stones, irrespective of the way of the bed, but more so where the stone is set up on edge, or at right angles, to its quarry bed.

They exfoliate or come off in leaves; all these effects belong, I believe, to the great class of phenomena of which slaty cleavage forms the most prominent example.