April i, 1890 ] THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. ?o 9 
of drinking diluted honey for thirty days afte 
marriage. Honey, in any form, can hardly have 
been in daily use even among the great, or surely 
Attila would not have drunk so much hydromel on 
his marriage day as to die from the consequences, 
The mass of the European people may be said to 
have been utterly without a sweetener until the 
increasing use of tea and coffee in the eighteenth 
century gradually converted sugar also into an 
article of food. In 1700 the amount of sugar used 
in Great Britain was 10,000 tons, which was equal 
to an average of a little more than three pounds 
per head of the population per annum. This 
would give as much sugar per day to each in- 
habitant of England, Scotland and Wales as a 
person might lift with moderation between the fore- 
finger and the thumb. What a wretched allowance ! 
In a list which formed the food of agricultural 
laborers in 1765, given in the London Magazine 
for that year, neither sugar nor tea is mentioned ; 
but in a similar list given by Sir P. Eden for 1796 
both are allowed. It is obvious that most of the 
grandmothers of the Bomewhat elderly members of 
the present generation never had their childish fits 
of waywardness mollified by any preparation of 
sugar. A hundred years ago the article must only 
have been beginning to be known in the smaller 
towns of England and Scotland. In 1796, Sir F. 
Eden's year, when the little Carlyle was making his 
parents' nights wretched with the atrabilious squal- 
ling of his infantile genius, the enterprising grocer 
was, no doubt, still in the prime of his life, who first 
ventured to introduce it to the gossips of Ecclefechan. 
Burns, as a ohild, probably never tasted it ; and 
when the little lame Wizard-boy of the North lay 
on his lonely hillside of the Scottish border, 
staring into the sun, with his childish brain already 
seething with the legends and romances of his 
native land, you might have travelled through all 
the villages from Galloway to Tweedmouth and 
asked for it almost in vain. So it was with gallant 
little Wales and the English Midlands. Could the 
ghosts of our great-grandmothers rise, not one of 
them would understand how it is that Sir W. 
Harcourt was lately making so much fuss about the 
Sugar Convention. Why, beet root sugar, which he 
has taken under his care, was only discovered a 
hundred and forty years ago, and nobody could 
extract it so as to make it pay until the beginning 
of the present century. — Evening Standard. 
SOME BIG DIAMONDS. 
The exhibition given by MM. Samson and Sandow 
at the Aquarium not long ago bore in many respects 
a curious resemblance to an incident that happened 
about five thousand years ago in Upper India. A 
numerous audience, as the reporters say, of chiefs 
and people had assembled to witness feats of 
strength and skill, tho performers being the grand- 
sons of a famous Maharaja. The Prince Arjuna 
especially distinguished himself ; and when, after 
goin(? through all his exercises, he prostrated himself 
at the feet of his tutor, the audience went into rap- 
tures of applause. But another athlete now appeared 
on the scene in tho shape of a young warrior named 
Kama, who performed all Arjuna's feats and a few 
more besides. The Prinoe, like M. Samson, lost his 
temper and proposed a single combat on the spot. The 
rival champions were about to settle tlieir differences 
in this way, when one of the Prince's baokers dis- 
covered tho faot that Kama was the sen of a chario- 
teer and beneath Arjuna's notice Arjuna at once 
declined to tight, and, darkness coming on the per- 
formance ended. The story is told at length in the 
great Sanskrit epio ; and. it is this Kama who is com- 
monly supposed to have been the original owner of 
the Koh-i-Noor, the splended diamond now inposses 
sion of Her Majesty the Queen. The popular version 
of the Koh-i-Noor legend haB been told by Sir Edwin 
Arnold. Karna was slain in the wars of the Maha- 
barata, and the diamond passed into other hands ; 
"but death and distress always accompanied its 
lustrous beauty." After being transferred from one 
royal dynasty to another, the gem fell into the hands 
of a Raja of Central India ; who, to quote the Emperor 
Babar's precise language, " was sent to Heil " by 
the first Mahomedan invaders of Hindustan Babar 
tells us about the famous diamond, which was so 
precious, he says, that an expert valued it at half the 
money spent daily by all people on earth. He him» 
self dec'ined to receive the baleful stone, and made it 
over to his son, from whom it descended to the 
great Moghuls of India. Aurunzebe's grandson wore 
it in his turban when he rode out to meet his con- 
queror, the Turkoman Nadir Shah. Nadir Shah 
caught sight of the flashing brilliant and cried, We 
will be friends, and exchange turbans in token of 
friendship." It was Nadir Shah who invented the 
name Koh-i-Noor, "the mountain of light." One 
of his suooessors lost it to the Afghan Ahmed Shah, 
and still misfortune followed the stone. The last 
of the Durani Shahs surrendered it to Bunjeet Singh, 
whose suooessors certainly had their share of ill luck. 
The first was poisoned. The next was wearing the 
gem when he was shot in rpen durbar. The third, 
Dhuleep Singh, surrendered the Koh-i-Noor to the 
English ; and, as Sir Edwin Arnold grandiloquently 
remarks, "it shines now upon a proud and unstained 
forehead — above all others as the gem surpasses other 
gems in luetre — and secured from disaster by the 
simple charm of a good and noble life." 
Such is the story related by Sir Edwin Arnold! 
and the same theory as to the origin of the Koh- 
i-Noor has been adopted by Mr. E. W. Streeter in 
his book about the great diamonds of the world, 
and by Professor Nicol in his article on diamonds 
in the " Enoycloptedia Britannica." But acoor.iing 
to Professor Valentine Ball, p, b. s., who has just 
brought out a learned and sumptuous edition of 
Tavernier's "Travels in India" (Macmillan), these 
eminent authorities are all wrong. He denies the 
identity of the Koh-i-Noor with the stone mentioned 
by Babar ; and, instead of making it a gem which 
has brought death and distress to its owners for 
fifty centuries, he gives it a much shorter and less 
sensational history. In 1832, we must explain, Her 
Majesty allowed an Amsterdam diamond-cutter to 
recut the Koh i-Noor. The work oost £8,000, and 
the money spent would hardly have been laid out 
more wastefully. The weight of the diamond was 
reduced by over 80 carats, and its distinctive 
character has been utterly destroyed. When the 
stone reached England it weighed 186& carats; it now 
weighs only 106-rV oarats. Now, in 1665 Tavernier, 
the French traveller, saw a diamond at the Court 
ofAurunzpbe which weighed, according to Professor 
Ball's reokoning, 268{£ English carats. This iB 
known as the Great Moghul's diamond ; and 
Professor Ball's theory is, that it wa3 the Great 
Moghul's diamond whioh Nadir Shah took to Persia, 
where it was cut down to the weight it had when 
sent to England (186 J carats) by one of Nadir's 
successors. His arguments are based on Tavernier's 
description and drawing of the stone, and on the 
fact that the Koh-i-Noor when brought to England 
showed two large oleavage planes, one of which 
had not even been polished and had distinctly been 
produced by fracture. On the other hand, Pro- 
fessor Ball is strongly of opinion that Babar's 
diamond is no other than the Dariya-i Noor, the 
Ocean of Light, now in the treasury of His Majesty 
the Shah of Persia. 
