46 The Diamond 



plainly bears out the fact that Pliny and his contemporaries knew very 

 well the properties of the real diamond, and, moreover, that diamond 

 affects diamond. In short, due allowance being made for inaccuracies 

 of the tradition of the Plinian text and the imperfect state of mineral- 

 ogical knowledge of that period, no fair criticism can escape from 

 the conclusion that Pliny's adamas is nothing but the diamond. The 

 fact that also other stones superficially resembling diamonds were at 

 that time taken for or passed off as diamonds, cannot change a jot of 

 this conclusion. Such substitutes have been in vogue everywhere and 

 at all times, and they are not even spared our own age. 1 Pliny's con- 

 demnation of these as not belonging to the genus (degeneres) and only 

 enjoying the authority of the name (nominis tantum auctoritatem 

 habent) reveals his discriminative critical faculty and his ability to 

 distinguish the real thing from the frame-up. The perpetuity of the 

 Plinian observations in regard to the adamas among the Arabs, Persians, 

 Armenians, Hindu, and Chinese, who all have focussed on the diamond 

 this classical lore inherited by him, throws additional evidence of most 

 weighty and substantial character into the balance of the ancients' 

 thorough acquaintance with the real diamond. The Arabs, assuredly, 

 were not feeble-minded idiots when they coined their word almas from 

 the classical adamas for the designation of the diamond, and this test of 

 the language persists to the present day. The Arab traders and 

 jewellers certainly were sufficiently wide awake to know what a dia- 

 mond is, and their Hindu and Chinese colleagues were just as keen in 

 recognizing diamonds, long before any science of mineralogy was estab- 

 lished in Europe. The world-wide propagation of the same notions, 

 the same lore, the same valuation connected with the stone, is iron-hard 

 proof for the fact that in the West and East alike this stone was the 

 diamond. This uniformity, coherence, perpetuity, and universality 

 of tradition form a still mightier stronghold than the interpretation of 

 the Plinian text. For this double reason there can be no doubt also that 

 the kin-kang of Chinese tradition is the diamond. 



Cut Diamonds. — Another question is whether the ancients were 

 cognizant of the diamond in its rough natural state only, or whether 

 they understood how to cut and polish it. This problem has caused 



1 There were rock-crystals found in northern Europe in the seventeenth century 

 and passed under the name of diamond. Johannes Scheffer (Lappland, p. 416, 

 Frankfurt, 1675) tells that the lapidaries sometimes used to polish these crystals 

 or diamonds of Lapland and to sell them as good diamonds, even frequently deceive 

 experts with them, because they are not inferior in lustre to the Oriental stones. In 

 the eighteenth century crystal was still called "false diamond" (J. Kunckell, 

 Ars Vitraria, p. 451, Nurnberg, 1743). 



