YAO ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
flooding the furnace with water. The sudden external cooling of 
the metal subjected the interior to enormous pressure while it was 
still extremely hot. When the iron was finally dissolved by acid 
the diamonds were found. Some years later another Frenchman, 
Lemoine by name, turned Moissan’s discoveries to more practical 
account in the perpetration of the famous diamond swindle, by 
means of which he mulcted Sir Julius Wernher of 1,671,000 francs. 
Sir Julius was, presumably, not seriously inconvenienced thereby, in 
view of his great holdings in the South African diamond mines, from 
which most diamonds are now derived. The initial discovery in 
these fields was made in 1867 by Dr. W. G. Atherstone, who identified 
as diamond a pebble obtained from a child on a farm on the banks 
of the Orange River. 
The diamond has played its part in history, and seldom creditably. 
You will recall at once the complicated affair of the diamond neck- 
lace, in which, shortly before the French Revolution, Marie An- 
toinette, Cardinal Rohan, Cagliostro, and many lesser personages 
were involved. Great names are associated with all the largest 
stones. The famous Sancy diamond of 53 carats passed successively 
through the hands of Charles the Bold, de Saucy, Queen Elizabeth, 
Henrietta Maria, Cardinal Mazurin, Louis XIV, only to be stolen 
during the French Revolution. It was later owned by a king of 
Spain, Prince Demidoff of Russia, and an Indian prince. 
The Orloff diamond, which weighed 194 carats, was stolen by a 
French sailor from the eye of an idol in a Brahman temple. From 
him it was again stolen by a ship’s captain, who murdered him. It 
was at last bought by Prince Orloff for £90,000 and by him presented 
to Catherine the Great of Russia. 
The sale of the Victoria diamond to the Nizam of Hyderabad for 
£400,000 is an impressive instance of form value. The diamond 
weighed 180 carats, or 576 grains, or one-tenth of a troy pound. 
The sales price of this particular piece of carbon was therefore at 
the rate of £4,000,000 sterling, or $20,000,000 per pound troy. 
The Premier mine in the Transvaal has yielded much the largest 
diamond ever found, a gigantic stone weighing 3,025 carats. It was 
known as the Cullinan diamond and was bought by the Transvaal 
Government for presentation to King Edward. Even that was 
eclipsed by the diamond throne which Buddhists believe to have 
stood near the Tree of Knowledge, beneath which Buddha received 
his revelation. The throne was 100 feet in circumference and made 
of a single diamond. Unfortunately, it seems to have been lost. 
But the diamond condescends to lend itself to the humbler pur- 
poses of mankind. The impure crystals and fragments known as 
bort and the inferior carbonado, or black diamond, are used to point 
the diamond rock drills so essential to the progress of great engineer- 
