Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/307

 the Premier mine near Pretoria, where was found the great Cullinan diamond, which weighed, before cutting, 3,025 carats, or a pound and a quarter. But Kimberley is the centre, and will remain so, unless other discoveries are made. At the end of 1908, it was estimated that eleven tons of diamonds, valued at $350,000,000, had been found at Kimberley. Diamonds weighing over an ounce are not infrequent; the largest found at Kimberley weighed over four ounces Before the passage of the Diamond Trade Act, thefts amounted to five million dollars a year, but the De Beers company regulated stealing as well as output, and the losses are now insignificant The finest diamond-cutting is lately being done in New York, and not in Amsterdam, as formerly. The diamonds cut in New York show more fire than diamonds cut in Amsterdam; they have a greater number of facets, and represent finer and better work. Cutting adds forty per cent to the value of diamonds, and an attempt is being made to put a tax of 20 per cent on all uncut diamonds sent out of South Africa. No cutting is done here, and the passage of such a law would add enormously to the country's labor roll The average man, in thinking of a diamond mine at Kimberley, imagines a great open hole in the earth, and thousands of men working at the bottom of it. As a matter of fact, no such mining is now done in Kimberley, although visitors may see great holes in which such mining was formerly carried on. Diamonds are now mined very much as gold is mined. Shafts are sunk to great depths in the earth, and drifts run in every direction from the bottom. Some of these shafts