556 



NATURE 



[October 8, 1891 



very likely the Koh-i-Nur. But that one large diamond of the 

 earlier time had been a famous stone for centuries. Legends 

 had gathered round it, and tradition had linked the legends 

 with authentic history in the dawn of the fourteenth century. 

 The tale was told briefly by Prof. H. H. Wilson in the sketch 

 of the Koh-i-Nur which he contributed to the official catalogue 

 of the Exhibition of 1851. No more competent person could 

 have performed the task than the great Orientalist and Sanscrit 

 scholar, with his large experience of Hindoo customs and modes 

 of thought. And he wrote the notice with the statements 

 before him that had been collected in the bazaars of India 

 by order of the Company at the time when the Koh-i-Nur 

 became a Crown jewel of the Queen. 



The latest historian of the Koh-i-Nur, however, dismisses 

 this curious tradition and its distinguished narrator by the some- 

 what flippant remark that " it has afforded sundry imaginative 

 writers a subject for highly characteristic paragraphs." 



The gentleman who writes in this tone of the eminent cus- 

 todian of the East India Company's Library cannot be expected 

 to treat Mr. King or any other man of learning less con- 

 temptuously ; but his qualifications for dealing with the subject 

 at all from a wider point of view than that of the old French 

 diamond-dealer will, perhaps, be fairly '.called in question by 

 the readers of the following pages. 



Yet Dr. Ball, of the Science and Art Department in Dublin, 

 has had Indian experience on the Geological Survey, an office 

 that ranks deservedly high even among the great departments 

 of the Indian public service. He has, furthermore, recently 

 thought the Indian part of Tavernier's "Voyages" worthy of a 

 fresh translation, which he has effected with judgment and with 

 notes, the topographic part of which, at least, appears to be of 

 considerable value and interest ; and he has otherwise been an 

 author on subjects that came before him in India as a geologist 

 and a sojourner. 



It is probably a sort of loyalty to the author whom he has 

 deemed worthy of so much of his time and industry that blinds 

 him in his advocacy of Tavernier's statements, notwithstanding 

 their manifold inconsistencies and absence of scholarlike quality. 

 I hope, while criticizing his hypotheses and statements regarding 

 the Koh-i-Nur, I may not in any respect quit a judicial attitude 

 to appear in that of a partisan. 



The great diamond to which allusion has been made emerges 

 in history in the first years of the fourteenth century. It was in 

 1300 A.D. in the hands of the Rajahs of Malwa, an ancient Raj 

 that had at one time spread over Hindostan, and in all the 

 vicissitudes of a thousand years had never bent to a Muham- 

 madan conqueror, until the generals of the Delhi Emperor Ala- 

 ud-din Muhammad Shah overran its rich territory, and carried 

 away the accumulated treasure of Ujjein in the first decad of the 

 fourteenth century. 



The date of 1304 is that given by Ferishta for this conquest, 

 and then it was that the great diamond takes its place in 

 history. In 1526 the invasion of India by Babar was crowned 

 by his victory on the famous battle-field of Panaput. Babar 

 himself — in those memoirs that rank only after the "Com- 

 mentaries " of Caesar as the most interesting records penned by 

 a great conqueror — describes the reception by his son Humayun 

 of the great diamond among the treasures which he was sent 

 forward to secure at the strong fortress at Agra. Babar gives 

 the weight of the diamond as being computed at 8 mishkals, and 

 in another place he compares the Muhammadan weights with 

 those of the Hindoo system, putting the mishkal as equivalent 

 to 40 of the little Hindoo units of weight, the rati. The dia- 

 mond, then, weighed near about 320 of these ratis. There are 

 several lines of investigation for determining the weight of the 

 mishkal ; and without here entering on a long but interesting 

 discussion of this weight, it will suffice to say that the most im- 

 portant of them converge on a value of from 73 to 74 troy 

 grains. If the mishkal weighed 73*636 troy grains, 8 such 

 mishkals would be 589*088 grains. The weight of the Koh-i- 

 Nur diamond in the Exhibition of 1851 was 589*52 troy grains. 

 It may be added that this latter weight is equivalent to i86iV 

 English carats of 3*1682 troy grains, and would require, to 

 make up the 320 ratis, a rati of the value of 1*8425 troy grains. 



It is very remarkable how numbers closely corresponding to 

 one or other of these values for the weight of a great diamond, 

 in carats or ratis, will recur in the subsequent discussion. Thus 

 Anselm de Boot, in commenting in the early years of the seven- 

 teenth century upon some observations on Indian diamonds 



NO. I 145, VOL. 44] 



made in the previous century by Garcias de Orto (a Portuguese 

 physician at the Viceregal Court of Goa), states the largest dia- 

 mond Garcias had seen to have weighed 187^ carats. Garcias 

 puts its weight at 140 mangelins. His translator (into Latin), 

 Le Cluze, interprets the 140 mangelins as equivalent to 700 

 grains (apparently French grains of the old poids de marc). But 

 De Boot evidently either had some separate authority for his 

 statement that the largest diamond Garcias had seen weighed 

 187^ carats, or had the means of reckoning more correctly than 

 Le Cluze the value in Dutch or in Portuguese carats of the 140 

 mangelins of Garcias. Garcias was in India for thirty years in 

 the reign of Akbar, a reign that, commencing three years 

 earlier and ending three years later, covered "the spacious 

 times of great Elizabeth " ; and if any European of the many 

 visiting India at that time would have had special opportunity of 

 seeing the great diamond in the treasury of Babar's grandson, it 

 would have been the body-physician of the Portuguese Viceroy. 

 Dr. Ball has got into a hopeless mess in an endeavour to dis- 

 credit observations of mine, and of my late learned friend Mr. 

 King, regarding this allusion of De Boot's to a diamond weighing 

 187^ carats. Dr. Ball is quite mistaken in supposing that he is 

 the first person who had an acquaintance with De Boot's 

 sources of information, with Le Cluze's translation of Garcias 

 into excellent Latin, and with the commentators who edited De 

 Boot and largely plagiarized from Le Cluze. In his " Natural 

 History of Precious Stones," Mr. King gave, in 1866, an 

 account of all these persons and their writings, but that accom- 

 plished scholar would certainly never have fallen into so absurd 

 an error as Dr. Ball has rushed into in connection with De 

 Boot's allusion to a i87|-carat diamond. 



Garcias, like Le Cluze, was a botanist, and his treatise was 

 on Indian botany. He, however, devoted a few pages to the 

 precious stones in vogue in India, and one short chapter is given 

 to the diamond. De Boot transcribed, with omissions, these 

 chapters of Garcias, and with misprints that probably arose from 

 the statements he made, and even the pages he incorporated, 

 being in the form of notes culled by him from a great variety of 

 sources, of which Garcias was only one. Among the misprints 

 or misapprehensions in De Boot's very remarkable book on 

 stores and gems, is that by which he always substitutes the name 

 of Monardes, a writer on the botany of the New World, in lieu of 

 that of Garcias, an error the source of which Mr. King explained 

 in the treatise above alluded to. Upon the passage in which 

 De Boot refers to the great diamond, and which runs thus : 

 " Nunquam tamen majorem (adamantem) illoqui pendebat 1874 

 ceratia, cujus mentionem facit Monardes, inventum fuisse puto," 

 Adrian Tull, a Belgian physician who edited the treatise of 

 Anselm de Boot, adds a note to the chapter, correcting the 

 name Monardes for that of Garcias, and then quoting from Le 

 Cluze another note introduced at the end of his translation of 

 the chapter, to the effect that he, Le Cluze, had never himself 

 seen a larger diamond in Belgium than one which weighed 190 

 grains. Dr. Ball quotes this note in the Latin of Le Cluze to 

 show that De Boot did not know what he was writing about, 

 and still less that Mr. King and, of course, myself did, inasmuch 

 as we had fastened upon De Boot's singular statement without 

 due study of our authors. It is the writer of the " true history " 

 of the Koh-i-Nur who has not gone to the authorities. Had he 

 done so, he would have found in the 1605 edition three notes on 

 this passage by Le Cluze. In the first he analyzes Garcias's 140 

 mangelins into * ' septingenta grana, sive unciam unam, drachmam 

 unam, scriptula duo, grana quatuor. Nam mangelis, ut ante 

 dixit noster auctor, quinque grana pendit, et septuaginta duobas 

 granis dragma constat." His next note alludes to the diamonds 

 he had seen himself in Belgium ; and the third is upon certain 

 crystals known as Bristol diamonds, found three miles from that 

 city. 



Passing from this curious aberration of Dr. Ball's, we may 

 ask, What did De Boot mean by alluding in a second 

 passage to the diamond Garcias had seen in India as weighing 

 i87§ carats ? As I have said, it is barely possible he had means 

 external to Garcias's statement in his book of knowing the 

 weight of this diamond. The weights summed together by Le 

 Cluze were apothecary weights, varying somewhat in different 

 localities in Western Europe from the corresponding divisions of 

 the French ounce of 576 French grains, equivalent to 472*1875 

 troy grains. The weight of the diamond on the French system 

 would be 573*776 grains troy according to Le Cluze's reckoning. 

 In terms of the old Netherlands ounce of 474*75 grains, current 



