The ordinary precious stones divide themselves broadly into crystallized, and uncrystallized or amorphous. The most beautiful jewels belong to the first class, and the substances chiefly used by the gem-engraver, such as onyx, agate, cornelian, &c., to the last. The diamond is crystallized carbon, the sapphire and ruby are crystallized clay, and the rock crystal and amethyst are crys tallized flint or quartz. The cut and polished diamond is one of the most beautiful of objects, but the rough stone is uninviting in appearance. It greatly resembles the common gravel by which it is surrounded, and is not unlike a lump of gum-arabic, yet experts find but little difficulty in detecting

that the human stomach can endure'is capa- | honour the jewel which has given a favourble of dissolving a pearl. Of the many ite Christian name to the female sex, and tales told of notable pearls, none can compare has added a word to the language to reprein interest with that related by Procopius sent an object of priceless value and a woof King Perozes and the pearl which a dar- man of exceeding excellence. ing diver obtained from the guardianship of the enamoured shark at the sacrifice of his own life. When the king was entrapped into a vast pitfall by the feigned retreat of the Ephthalite Huns he was pursuing, he tore from his right ear this glorious jewel, and cast it before himself into the abyss, comforted in his last moment with the thought that he had deprived the foe of the greatest trophy of their victory. The pearl is well supplied with names, and the etymology of all of them is of much interest. The chief of these is Margarite (Greek, uapyapirns, Latin, margarita), which is evidently closely related to the Persian word murwari; but the great German philologist Grimm has given the following very remark-it. able explanation of the word. 'Coarse gravel (glarea) is termed in old High German, krioz, griez (masc.), and in the new High German, gries (masc.); the AngloSaxon greot, English, grit, means terra, pulvis; the old Norse (neuter) griot, lapis. As men found the pearls on the sea-shore, they took them for stones, and named them, in old High German, merikrioz (masc.); in middle High German, mergriez, or mergrieze; in Anglo-Saxon, meregreot (neuter). To the ancients, papyapiτns, margarita, was a barbarous word (Plin. 9, 35). Mergriez affords a correct sense, and cannot be deduced from margarita. In margarita, therefore, a German word of a very early time has been preserved to us in one of the oldest monuments of our language (Gothic, marigriuts, marigruitós, or marigruit, marigruita). At a later period it was superseded by the foreign perula, perle; and we find mergriezen used in the sense of grains of sand.' 1 The real objection to this conjecture is the fact that pápyapirns was an adjective, the primary substantive being papyapov, and consequently the last part, yapirns, could not be deduced directly from any German form of the substantive grit. The real problem is the origin of margaron, and not of margarites. It is, however a remarkable coincidence that the Teutonic compound meaning 'sea-grit should so closely resemble the Greek word, which is apparently of Persian origin. As in a university list of honours the nan who is without peer is marked off from his fellows in the examination, so it seems well to specially

When Tavernier visited the Indian diamond mines, he saw the children of the merchants, from the age of ten to fifteen or sixteen, seated in a prominent position, and ready to become purchasers of the stones that were found. His relation is as follows: Each boy has his diamond weights and bag with money. If any one brings them a stone they hand it to the eldest boy, who looks at it and then hands it to the one next him, by which means it goes from hand to hand till it returns to bim again. After that he demands the price; but if he buys it too dear it is upon his own account. In the evening the boys bring the diamonds they have bought to the great merchants, and the profit is divided equally among them.'

The diamond is the hardest of all known natural substances, and this quality alone. would make it a valuable object, even bad it no value as a jewel.

The diamond-why 'twas beautiful and hard, Whereto his invised properties did tend. In the popular mind the qualities of hardness and toughness have been confused in this instance, so that the notion has been prevalent that if a diamond is laid upon an anvil and struck with a hammer, instead of breaking, it will be driven into the anvil, but we may presume that few have sufficient faith in this test to make the costly experiment. In point of fact, the diamond is very easily broken, on account of the very thin layers of which it is composed, and those who are accurately acquainted with the point of cleavage can divide it with a simple pen-knife. Dr. Wollaston used his knowledge of this peculiarity with great advantage to himself when

he bought a faulty diamond from Messrs. Rundell and Bridge for £6,000, and after separating the flawed portions, which served for a ring and a set of shirt-studs, resold the remaining perfect stone for £7,000. The word adamas among the earliest Greek writers signified a hard metal, and not a precious stone, as we may guess when we read of the adamantine chains of Prometheus, which certainly were not strings of diamonds. Plato's adamas is supposed to have been the white sapphire. Manilius, who flourished in the latter part of the Augustan age, is the first writer who describes the true diamond under the name of adamas.

ting. Although the greatest skill is required in the cutters, they are rather poorly paid. The three forms in which diamonds are cut are the table, the rose, and the brilliant. The two first forms were long the only ones in use, but when the brilliant cutting was introduced they were superseded, except for inferior stones. The brilliant is a double pyramid or cone cut off by a large plane, called the table, at the top, and by a small one, called the collet, at the bottom. The facets have to be so adjusted that the girdle (which determines the greatest horizontal expansion of the stone) shall present a prismatic edge; and so accurate is the eye of the cutter from constant practice, that this is done by a sort of instinct, without any measurement. The adjustment of the relative sizes of the table and the collet is also a very important matter, as the light that penetrates from above must be totally reflected internally. Jacomo da Trezzo engraved subjects upon the diamond in the year 1564, and is said to have been the first to do so, but his right to this honour has been disputed, and claimed for Birago, another Milanese. It is supposed, however, that much of this misplaced ingenuity was displayed upon the white topaz or the colourless sapphire, which stones have often been mistaken for diamonds.

The Romans placed the diamond in the very highest rank as a precious stone, but as they were in the habit of wearing the crystals in their native form, this eminent position must have been given to it more on account of its scarcity than for its beauty. It was supposed to keep off insanity, dispel vain fears, drive away phantasms and nightmares, and baffle poison, but that if swallowed it became itself the deadliest of all poisons. Cellini tells a fabulous story of how his life was preserved from the machinations of an enemy by the roguery of an apothecary, who, being employed to pulverize a diamond intended to season the artist's salad, substituted a bit of beryl in its stead. We do not know when the diamond was first polished with its own dust, but the art of cutting it into a regular form, so as to bring out all possible lustre, was not practised before the year 1456, when Louis van Berghem made a revolution in the trade by the discovery of the art of diamond-cutting. In 1475 he was employed by Charles the Bold of Burgundy to cut three large stones, previously worn by the king in their natural state as eight-sided crystals (points naives). It was nearly two hundred years later (1650), during the supremacy of Cardinal Mazarin, that the true brilliant shape was discovered. The English diamond-cutters used to be renowned for the perfection of their work, and even now an old English cut brilliant will command a higher price in the market than one cut by the Dutch. When those cutters died off the trade fell into the hands of the Jews, who chose Amsterdam as the place where they could obtain most freedom, and that city became the seat of this branch of industry. Professor Tennant, however, tells us that the diamondcutting trade is coming back to England again, and some excellent work has been done here of late years. It is estimated The weight of diamonds is calculated as follows:-4 grains 1 carat; 1414 carats = that out of the 28,000 Jews living in Amounce troy. It will thus be seen that a diamond sterdam, 10,000 are dependent directly or grain is less than an ordinary troy grain. 5 indirectly upon the trade of diamond-cut-diamond grains are equal to 4 troy grains.

The diamond has been found in almost every colour, from the slightest tint to the most pronounced dye, and the rose-coloured diamond as far eclipses the ruby as the green does the emerald' and the blue the sapphire. A yellowish tinge is considered a great defect, but a decided colour is valued for its rarity as well as for its beauty. Thus, Mr. Emanuel notices a brilliant emerald green stone of five grains,* that sold for £320, which, if white, would only have been worth £28. In the jewel room of the Dres den Green Vaults is the unique green brilliant which weighs 40 carats, and formerly belonged to the elector of Saxony-Augustus the Strong. The celebrated Hope blue diamond is supposed by Barbot to be the stone that disappeared from the French regalia at the time of the Great Revolution. It then weighed 67 carats, but has since been recut as a brilliant, and reduced in weight. In the Russian treasury is a brilliant red diamond of 10 carats, which was bought by Paul I. for 100,000 roubles. Mr. King writes that the most charming piece of jewellery he ever beheld was a

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spray, composed with exquisite taste, entire- | Bernardino Fonseca Lobo brought news to ly of coloured diamonds of all the tints that Lisbon of the existence of large numbers of could be collected during ten years' research diamonds among the gold washings in the by the skilful but unfortunate artist-gold-province of Minas Geraes, Brazil, they spread smith who designed and executed the orna- a report that the stones had been sent surreptitiously from Goa to South America. The discovery was made by accident, owing to Lobo having noticed the peculiarity of the small stones which the miners used as card counters. The same suspicion was exhibited when it was first reported that diamonds had been found in Africa. Professor Tennant made a very interesting report respecting these Cape diamonds before the geological section of the British Association in September, 1875. He said that the late Mr. Mawe, who wrote on diamonds and described their mode of occurrence in his Travels in Brazil' (London, 1812), told bim of the probability of their existence in South Africa, and affirmed that if people only knew them in their natural state they must be found. Mawe died in 1829, and Mr. Tennant took every opportunity of making the subject known; but it was not until March, 186 that the first Cape diamond was found. The supply since then has been very considerable, and it is estimated that the value of the diamonds found during the period that has elapsed since the first discovery is above thirteen millions of pounds sterling. In spite of this immense addition to the store of diamonds, their value has not diminished, but rather increased, since Jeffries published his rule for ascertaining the value of cut diamonds.

The first record of the burning of a diamond is to be found in the proceedings of the Academia del Cimento of Florence, in the seventeenth century; but although some French chemists burnt one in 1771, the question of its combustion continued for some years to be disputed. It was subsequently proved that it burned, and produced carbonic acid gas. Diamonds are found in the beds of rivers, mostly in companionship with gold. The diamond mines of Central India originally supplied the world with nearly all the notable diamonds, but they are now nearly superseded. During the centuries that they were worked they produced an enormous quantity of fine stones, and it is said that one of the Mahommedan emperors, who died at the end of the twelfth century, managed to amass in his treasury 400lbs. weight of diamonds. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a Portuguese gentleman went to the ancient mine of Currure, belonging to the king of Golconda, to dig for diamonds, but after spending a large sum of money, and converting everything he possessed, even to his clothes, into coin, he had still found nothing. While the miners were employed upon the last day's work that he had money to pay for, he prepared a cup of poison, to drink if the men came empty-handed from work; but in the evening they brought him a valuable stone, and his purpose was instantly changed. Before returning to Goa, he set up a monument, with an inscription in the native tongue to the following effect :

Your wife and children sell, sell what you have, Spare not your clothes-nay, make yourself a slave;

But money get, then to Currure make haste, There search the mines, a prize you'll find at last.*

The diamonds of Borneo are held in high repute, and according to Sir Stamford Raffles, few courts of Europe could perhaps boast of a more brilliant display than in the prosperous days of the Dutch was exhibited by the ladies of Batavia, the principal and only mart then opened for the Bornean diamond mines.'

The dealers have always looked with disfavour upon any attempts to discover mines in new quarters, and when in the year 1727

*Philosophical Transactions.' Vol. xii. p.

909.

many persons believe it to be only a white | of the diamond spread over Europe, and topaz.