Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/478

460 "into what cloes the diamond blaze, when, on combustion, the spirit of the gem leaps upward home again to its parent, the sun; into what but carbonic-acid gas?—that carbon dioxide of the chemist which attends the combustion of every fire-and gas-burner, the decomposition of every vegetable, which is exhaled in every breath we breathe?" The same writer also utters the less pleasing but equally striking thought that "the chimney-sweep is covered by that which, under happier auspices, would be jewels."

The diamond is mentioned yerj anciently in literature. Jupiter, according to classical mythology, was anxious to make men forget the days he had spent among them, and finding that one man—Diamond of Crete—remembered him, turned him into a stone: not a very credible story of the origin of the gem, but men of science in the nineteenth century are not much nearer to knowing the truth on the subject. The Greeks call the stone adamas (ảẟáμaς) the indomptable or unchangeable; and from this has come down our word adamantine and, after the letters have undergone changes of a kind that are not rare in the growth of language, our name of the stone itself. But, long before the Greeks had emerged from the darkness of the mythic age, the diamond was made, among the Hebrews, the peculiar jewel of the tribe of Zebulon; and Aaron's breastplate, when he was dressed in his priestly robes, was adorned in the second of the four rows of its setting with precious stones—with an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond; and Jeremiah, when the Greeks were just beginning to be known, rebuking the misgoings of his people, said, "The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond."

But, although the ancients considered the diamond indestructible, and were capable of trying the most daring experiments with it, no specimen that is known to have belonged to them has come down to us. Some persons suppose that the Koh-i-nor is five thousand years old, as man's possession, but no one knows or can trace its history back with certainty for more than a few centuries.

The diamond has been found in widely separated parts of the world. Among these, Central India, Sumatra, Borneo, the Ural Mountains, California, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and China have been named, in their several times, as principal localities, while it might be hard to enumerate all the minor sites. The Greeks said it was found in Ethiopia. The Indian mines are certainly of very high antiquity, for the stones are mentioned in the "Mahabaratta," and the Romans obtained their supplies chiefly from the mines of Jumalpoor, in Bengal. The Indian mines are scattered along the center of the peninsula, through 10° of latitude, from near the southern bank of the Ganges in latitude 25° to latitude 15° in the Madras Presidency. The most famous ones where those of Golconda, in the Nizam's territory, which were called after the city and fort of that name, where was the market to which they wero brought, although none of them were