460 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" into what docs the diamond blaze, when, on combustion, the spirit of 

 the gem leaps upward home again to its parent, the sun ; into what 

 but carbonic-acid gas ? — that carbon dioxide of the chemist which 

 attends the combustion of every fire- and gas-burner, the decomposi- 

 tion of every vegetable, which is exhaled in every breath we breathe ? " 

 The same writer also utters the less pleasing but equally striking 

 thought that "the chimney-sweep is covered by that which, under 

 happier auspices, would be jewels." 



The diamond is mentioned very anciently in literature. Jupiter, 

 according to classical mythology, was anxious to make men forget the 

 days he had spent among them, and finding that one man — Diamond 

 of Crete — remembered him, turned him into a stone : not a very cred- 

 ible story of the origin of the gem, but men of science in the nine- 

 teenth century are not much nearer to knowing the truth on the sub- 

 ject. The Greeks call the stone adamas (dSa/nas) the indomptable or 

 unchangeable ; and from this has come down our word adamantine 

 and, after the letters have undergone changes of a kind that are not 

 rare in the growth of language, our name of the stone itself. But, 

 long before the Greeks had emerged from the darkness of the mythic 

 age, the diamond was made, among the Hebrews, the peculiar jewel 

 of the tribe of Zebulon ; and Aaron's breastplate, when he was dressed 

 in his priestly robes, was adorned in the second of the four rows of its 

 setting with precious stones — with an emerald, a sapphire, and a dia- 

 mond ; and Jeremiah, when the Greeks were just beginning to be 

 known, rebuking the misgoings of his people, said, " The sin of Judah 

 is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond." 



But, although the ancients considered the diamond indestructible, 

 and were capable of trying the most daring experiments with it, no 

 specimen that is known to have belonged to them has come down to 

 us. Some persons suppose that the Koh-i-nor is five thousand years 

 old, as man's possession, but no one knows or can trace its history 

 back with certainty for more than a few centuries. 



The diamond has been found in widely separated parts of the 

 world. Among these, Central India, Sumatra, Borneo, the Ural 

 Mountains, California, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and China 

 have been named, in their several times, as principal localities, while it 

 might be hard to enumerate all the minor sites. The Greeks said it 

 was found in Ethiopia. The Indian mines are certainly of very high 

 antiquity, for the stones are mentioned in the " Mahabaratta," and the 

 Romans obtained their supplies chiefly from the mines of Jumalpoor, 

 in Bengal. The Indian mines are scattered along the center of the 

 peninsula, through 10° of latitude, from near the southern bank of the 

 Ganges in latitude 25° to latitude 15° in the Madras Presidency. The 

 most famous ones were those of Golconda, in the Nizam's territory, 

 which were called after the city and fort of that name, where was the 

 market to which they were brought, although none of them were 



