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Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. 
A prosaic motive for the story can perhaps be furnished from Kimberley 
experience. It is said that in the early days of Kimberley the breeding of 
poultry was a profitable business, for the birds wandering at large over the 
debris irom the mines always picked up and swallowed the small diamonds they 
saw, and the crop of every fowl slaughtered in the place was carefully searched 
in consequence. Some years ago I saw a diamond of about half a carat which 
was stated, on the good authority of the owner, to have been taken from a 
fowl's crop. On one occasion twenty-three diamonds, weighing 5J carats 
altogether, were found in the crop of a pigeon which had been shot on the 
De Beers depositing floors. Ostriches are known to swallow pieces of glass 
and stone and various bright minerals, and the fact has been invoked to 
account for the sporadic finds of diamonds along the Orange River.*' Strip 
the legends of their romantic accretions and there is no great difference 
between them and things that happen. Now that the mining area is 
enclosed and there is not very much unwashed kimberlite debris left 
people do not bother so much about opening a fowl's crop, but plenty of 
small garnets and zircons can still be found that way. 
In a footnote to the chapter on the "Legend " (p. 16) the author remarks 
that " The knowledge of the diamond certainly does not go back in India 
into that unfathomable antiquity as pretended by some mineralogical and 
other authors. It was wholly unknown in the Vedic period, from which no 
specific names of precious stones are handed down at all. The word mani, 
which has sometimes been taken to mean the diamond, simply denotes a 
bead used for personal ornamentation and as an amulet, and the arbitrary 
notion that it might refer to the diamond is disproved by the fact that it 
could be strung on a thread." As to that, possibly the notion is an arbitrary 
one, like many other statements concerning the diamond ; nevertheless, 
natural diamond beads are sometimes found. My own collection, for 
example, contains a dozen " strung on a thread." One way in which these 
natural beads can be formed depends upon the fact that diamond crystallises 
readily about various foreign minerals, such as ilmenite, garnet, zircon, 
diopside, olivine, iron pyrites, t graphite, etc. When these foreign minerals 
are not completely enclosed they may often be easily removed or they may 
drop out of themselves, leaving a hole sometimes extending right through the 
diamond. The readiness with which diamond crystallises about foreign 
minerals acts, indeed, to its own hurt, for the inclusion, if complete, 
invariably cracks the diamond sooner or later, giving rise to the frequent 
* E.g." the possibility of the existence of diamond deposits near the junction of 
the Orange and Vaal was flatly denied by a pretentious examiner who came from 
England to report on the Hopetown field. It was gravely asserted that any diamonds 
in that field must have been carried in the gizzards of ostriches from some far-distant 
region." G. F. Williams, ' The Diamond Mines of South Africa/ p. 122, 1902. 
t The " leaf of gold " said to have been seen in the centre of a beautifully crystal- 
lised Brazilian diamond may have been pyrites or mica. 
