462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from, the sands in the valleys by wearing slippers of straw which 

 catch the precious stones and hold them, and then, on being burned 

 give them up. Diamonds in considerable quantities have been mined 

 in Borneo, which has furnished one of the largest gems in the world, 

 valued by the Governor of Batavia, who made the offer to the owner 

 to be refused, at the worth of two brigs of war fully equipped and 

 ammunitioned, plus one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Some 

 specimens have been found in Australia, which might have attracted 

 more attention but for the discovery of the South-African fields, and 

 small numbers or small crystals in nearly every other country. 



The diamond-fields of South Africa are richer and more extensive 

 than any others — so far as we know of present and have accounts of 

 past richness — although they were only discovered less than twenty 

 years ago. They are situated in Griqualand West, north of the 

 Orange River, at an elevation of four thousand feet above the sea, 

 six hundred and ten miles from Cape Town, and four hundred and 

 eighty miles from Port Elizabeth. They might have been found long 

 before they were, for the place was marked on a French mission-map 

 of 1750 with the phrase " Id sont des diamante " (" Here there are 

 diamonds "), but that had long been lost sight of or disregarded. The 

 rivers of the region had been resorted to by the natives and their 

 ancestors for perhaps generations, for crystals with which to bore 

 their weighting-stones, but no account seems to have been taken of that 

 fact. Van Niekerk's children at Barkly, on the Vaal, and De Beer's 

 at Dutoitspan, were in the habit of playing with the diamonds along 

 with the other pretty pebbles which they found in the gravel, and no 

 one thought the diamonds were anything more than pretty stones till 

 one evening in March, 18G7, when a trader, John O'Reilly, "out- 

 spanned " at Mr. Niekerk's farm. " O'Reilly saw a beautiful lot of 

 Orange River stones on the table, and examined them. ' I told Nie- 

 kerk,' he says, ' they were very pretty. He showed me another lot, out 

 of which I at once picked the first diamond. I asked him for it, 

 and he told me I could have it, as it belonged to a Bushman boy of Dan- 

 iel Jacob's. I took it at once to Hope Town, and made Mr. Chalmers, 

 civil commissioner, aware of the discovery. I then took it on to Coles- 

 berg, and gave it to the acting civil commissioner there, for transmis- 

 sion to Cape Town to the high commissions'. ' " Another account says 

 that O'Reilly and Nickerk tried the stone on the window, and scratched 

 the glass with scratches that are still there ; and that on his way, O'Reilly 

 was laughed at for believing that he had a diamond, and the stone 

 was taken from him and thrown into the street, whence he had some 

 difficulty in recovering it. This stone was sold to Sir Philip Wode- 

 house, for £500. Several other diamonds were obtained during the 

 year, among them the famous "Star of South Africa," which was 

 bought of a native for £400, and sold in Hope Town for more than 

 .110,000 ; and now, cut, reduced from 83£ carats in the rough to 4G£ 



