36 A CHAPTER ON DIAMONDS. 



recognize tliem again. The cymopliane (cliiysoberyl or chryso- 

 lite) is the only gem that can compete with it. 



The Greek called this gem " aclamas,"^ It was esteemed victo- 

 rious over fire, and capable of resisting the hardest things. The 

 test of a diamond, in the Brazils, is still said to be to resist the 

 strongest blows of a hammer when placed in a stone. A talisman 

 among the poetic Easterns, it was esteemed by the Romans favour- 

 able under the planet Mars. The notions of the ancients about 

 diamonds have, indeed, been always full of the mystical. Accor- 

 ping to Pliny, there existed between the diamond and the magnet 

 a natural antipathy. By the alchemists it was supposed to cure 

 insanity, and to be an antidote to poisons ; and yet, strange to 

 say, Paracelsus is recorded to have been poisoned by diamond- 

 powder. It having become a common saying that a cliamond was 

 softened and broken if steeped in the blood of a goat. Sir Thomas 

 Brown averred, in his anxiety to correct so vulgar an error, that a 

 diamond being steeped in goat's blood rather receives thereby an 

 increase of hardness ! 



From the extreme brilliancy of the diamond, and its purity, it 

 was consecrated to all that was celestial, and accordingly, supposed 

 that it would triumph over all means employed to subdue it, the 

 solar ray excepted. It did triumph indeed, over the hot furnaces 

 to which it was exposed in the crucible of the alchemist ; but the 

 spell which united it to the sunbeam is now dissolved, and it has 

 yielded to the severity of the torture and inquisition of modern 

 curiosity. 



Newton, we have seen, reasoning from its great density and 

 high refractive property, concluded that the diamond was combus- 

 tible or, to use his own language, an unctuous substance coagu- 

 lated," though he was, in some measure, anticipated by Boetius 

 de Boot, in 1609. The event has amply verified this conjecture, 

 and the Tuscan philosophers and the Honourable Mr. Boyle ascer- 

 tained the fact. The first grand experiment to prove the combus- 

 tibihty of the diamond took place in the presence of Cosmo III., 

 Grand Duke of Tuscany, wherein the diamond being exposed in 

 the focus of the great lens, (still in the Grand Duke's laboratory 

 at Florence,) it was entirely volatilized, thus corroborating the 

 ancient tradition that the solar ray would triumph over it. Guy- 



^ Unconquerable, whence our *^ adamant." 



