404 



NATURE 



{Feb. 26, 1SS0 



watered. Annatto openly accomplishes the first, nature 

 has no occasion to be ashamed of the second, nor an 

 exhausted cow of the third. 



There is reason to hope the time is not far off when it 

 may be said of town milk-supplies that if we will only do 

 our part in taking care of the pence, the pounds may 

 safely be trusted to take care of themselves. And if we 

 have no justification for the comparatively hard service 

 still required of milk, we may at least allow it a precedent 

 dating from a time even earlier than that at which any 

 land can have " flowed with milk and honey." 



ARTIFICIAL PRODUCTION OF DIAMONDS 



GLASGOW seems determined to have the honour of 

 producing the diamond artificially. In spite of Mr. 

 Mactear's recent failure, Mr. J. B. Hannay, whose paper 

 on the solubility of solids in gases we published not long 

 ago, has been utilising the method indicated in that paper 

 in experiments on the artificial production of the diamond. 

 Mr. Hannay reads a paper on the subject at the Royal 

 Society to-night, and any remarks on his work we shall 

 postpone for the present. Meantime from the letters and 

 articles that have appeared in the papers, we may form 

 some idea of what has been done. Prof. Story Maskelyne, 

 writing to the Times, says : — 



" A few weeks since I had to proclaim the failure of 

 one attempt to produce the diamond in a chemical 

 laboratory. To-day I ask a little space in one of your 

 columns in order to announce the entire success of such 

 an attempt by another Glasgow gentleman. That gentle- 

 man is Mr. J. Ballantine Hannay, of Woodboume, 

 Helensburgh, and Sword Street, Glasgow, a Fellow of the 

 Chemical Society of London, who has to-day sent me 

 some small crystallised particles presenting exactly the 

 appearance of fragments of a broken diamond. In lustre, 

 in a certain lamellar structure on the surfaces of cleavage, 

 in refractive power, they accorded so closely with that 

 mineral that it seemed hardly rash to proclaim them even 

 at first sight to be diamond. And they satisfy the cha- 

 racteristic tests of that substance. Like the diamond, 

 they are nearly inert in polarised light, and their hardness 

 is such that they easily scored deep grooves in a polished 

 surface of sapphire, which the diamond alone can do. I 

 was able to measure the angle between the cleavage faces 

 of one of them, notwithstanding that the image from one 

 face was too incomplete for a very accurate result. But 

 the mean of the angles so measured on the goniometer 

 was 70 deg. 29 mm., the correct angle on a crystal of the 

 diamond being 70 deg. 317 min. Finally one of the 

 particles, ignited on a foil of platinum, glowed and gradu- 

 ally disappeared exactly as mineral diamond would do. 

 There is no doubt whatever that Mr. Hannay has suc- 

 ceeded in solving this problem and removing from the 

 science of chemistry an opprobrium so long adhering to 

 it ; for, whereas the larger part of the great volume re- 

 cording the triumphs of that science is occupied by the 

 chemistry of carbon, this element has never been crystal- 

 lised by man till Mr. Hannay achieved the triumph which 

 I have the pleasure of recording to-day. His process for 

 effecting this transmutation, hardly less momentous to the 

 arts than to the possessors of a wealth of jewellery, is on 

 the eve of being announced to the Royal Society." 



The Glasgow Herald, in referring to Mr. Hannay's dis- 

 covery, states in a general way that his process "involves 

 the simultaneous application of enormous pressure— pro- 

 bably many tons on the square inch of surface within the 

 apparatus — and a very high temperature, ranging up to a 

 dull red heat. It may be said that the process is the 

 outcome of a thoroughly scientific investigation into the 

 subject of solution, and not a 'happy-go-lucky' hit. 

 We understand that hydrocarbon compounds have been 

 used in the process, but we have some hesitation in con- 

 cluding that the crystalline carbon is of necessity obtained 



by the dissociation of those compounds; by and by, 

 however, that point will doubtless be satisfactorily estab- 

 lished. So far as we can learn, Mr. Hannay's experiment:- 

 were not all successful, there being, it is said, far more 

 failures than successes ; the latter, however, occurred 

 near the end of the series, thus showing that the operator 

 had become familiar with the conditions under which the 

 dissociation of the carbon was effected, and its subsequent 

 deposition in the crystalline form. It would seem that 

 up to the present only very small crystalline particles 

 have been obtained, and hence the process must be an 

 exceedingly expensive one to produce a real gem ; some- 

 thing like spending 5/. to get 5.?., to speak roughly." 



Prof. Roscoe, writing to the Times, states that the use 

 of his name as having accepted Mr. Hannay's discovery 

 as an accomplished fact has not been authorised by him, 

 and that the evidence yet submitted to him by Mr. 

 Hannay is insufficient, in his opinion, to establish so 

 important a conclusion. 



THE HISTORY OF WRITING » 

 II. 



THE new alphabet eventually made its way from the 

 Delta to the old home of the Phcenicians on the 

 coast of Palestine. Already in the time of David the 

 Syrians had their historians and state annals, and Hiram 

 of Tyre, we are told, wrote letters to King Solomon. The 

 Phoenician alphabet, as we may now call it, was commu- 

 nicated to the Israelites along with other elements of 

 culture, and the neighbouring populations of Edom, of 

 Amnion, and of Moab received it at the same time. 

 Names had already been given to the letters, derived 

 from Phoenician words which began with the several 

 letters of the alphabet, a, for instance, being called aleph. 

 "an ox," b, belli, "a house," and so on. In this way the 

 meaning of each letter was the more easily impressed 

 upon the memory of the Phoenician schoolboy, just as in 

 our own nurseries it used to be thought that we should 

 have less difficulty in learning our alphabet if we were 

 taught that " A was an archer who shot at a frog," than 

 if we were simply told that A was A. Names and letter^ 

 alike were imported into the countries that adjoined 

 Phoenicia, and in course of time inscriptions in the 

 new characters were engraved upon stone, as well as 

 painted on the more perishable materials of papyrus or 

 bark. The earliest monument of the Phoenician alphabet 

 that has come down to us is the famous Moabite Stone, 

 discovered a few years ago on the site of Dibon, which 

 records the conquests and buildings of King Mesha, the 

 contemporary of Ahab. The forms assumed by the 

 characters upon this stone must have been the same as 

 those employed by the Jewish prophets when writing 

 down their prophecies or recording the history of their 

 times. . . 



Meanwhile the northern neighbours of the Phoenicians, 

 who lived on the shores of the Gulf of Antioch, had been 

 venturing on trading voyages into the far west and carrying 

 with them a knowledge of the alphabet along with the 

 wares and pottery of the East. They had found the 

 inhabitants of Asia Minor and the adjacent islands in pos- 

 session of a syllabary, the origin of which is still a puzzle, 

 but as they pushed further westward into the islands of 

 the /Egean and the harbours of Greece, they discovered 

 a people wholly illiterate and unacquainted even with the 

 rudiments of picture-writing. Amongst this people whom 

 we now term Greeks, they soon established colonies, the 

 most important being at Thebes, and in the islands ot 

 Melos and Thera. The island of Thera was probably the 

 first spot on European soil where words were translatea 

 into written symbols. The earliest Greek inscriptions, it 

 is believed by competent authorities, belong to I nera.ano. 

 1 Lecture at the London Institution, February 12, by Prof. A. H. Sayce. 

 Continued from p. 380. 



