The Sunday herald and weekly national intelligencer., 1890-06-22
PART |.

mauOn TO Jne square lnCn Jnan any Quiet upon
which ill-informed writers undertake to en-
tighten the reading world. Having been ut
terly confused and confounded by the contra
dictons, impossibilties, and absurdities of a
number of newspaper and magazine articles
which had read concerning diamonds, and es-
pecially the great diamonds of the world, l de-
termined to make something of a systematic
search through what may be called the standard
literature on the subject, and think will de-
serve the thanks of newspaper readers generally
if put together brief summary of the facts
in the case that seem to be established by the
best authorities. At the beginning it may be
well to state that carat is about four grains,
and that $50 grains or about 100 carats make one
ounce. No writer on the subject claims that
there are in existence more than a hundred dia-
monds over the weight of thirty carats each;
and no author, as far as can find, has given a
satisfactory, reliable authoritative account of
half that number. Edwin Streeter the London
ieweler and author, in the account of the
Great Diamonds of the World which he pub
lished in 1882 prints the names Of seventy, but
careful reading of what is said about each
shows plainly that several of these are duplicates,
or that they are merely names for diamonds that
donot now exist,if indeed they ever had an exist
tence. Those who do say that there are in exist
ence about one hundred diamonds of thirty carat
weight or more say that about fifty Of them are
in Europe and the remainder in lndia Persia,
and Borneo, where diamonds have been boarded
ever since men began to be either vain or avar-
cious In the United States there are lots of
the smaller diamonds, but none Of the large
ones.
The book entitled his ''Six Voyages" which
Jean Baptiste Tavernier published in Paris in
1916. has been the bible of all who have written
on the subject of great diamonds ever since.
Tavernier was French jeweer, the greatest
diamond expert of his day. He travelled ex-
tensively in Asia, visiting the mines where dia-
monds were found, the marts where they were
bought and sold, and the courts where mostly
they shone. In the accounts of his travels this
Tayernier mentions many large diamonds which
nobody else has ever mentioned, except in
quoting from him, and which nobody since his
time has ever been able to see or even to locate.
In fact, the gifted and enterprising Frenchman
seems to me to have INDUCED in good deal of
romancing, not to say fim-lam, yet his unsup
ported statements have been accepted gospel
by his followers from that day to this. The
great diamonds which Tavernier saw at Delhi
i'm capital of the Mogul Empire, when he
visited Emperor Aurungzeb there in 1865, were
numerous and extremely interesting, but not
One-half of them have ever been seen or heard
of since. The ''Great Mogul," which still
stands at the head of the published lists of great
diamonds as the largest cut diamond in the
world, seems never to have been seen by mortal
eve since Tavernier according to his own ac-
COUNT saw it at Delhi in 1865. What conclu-
sion must one come to in the circumstances !?
Why, that Tavernier would have made pretty
good newspaper reporter, even in these days of
hurrying, striving, competitive American jour
nalism.
The literature of the diamond is older than
Chrstanity but it is full of fables, fancies, and
contradictions, and is utterly unreliable. In the
early part of the present century Mr.. Karl Rit-
ter published work entitled "Erdkunde Asien,'
in which lin Volume VIZ he condensed all the
information regarding Indian diamonds which
was available at that time.
Previous to Ritters compilation one in search
of diamond literature would have to seek it as
it lay scattered about through the works of Dio-
nysius Perigetes, who wrote B. G. 30; Pliny,
A. D, 20; Ptolemy, A. d. 100; Marco Polo, thir-
teenth century; Nicolo Conte and Serves Urto-
mannus, fifteenth century; Gracias alb Horto,
1865; Caesar Frederick, 1867; Fitch and New
berry, 1888; the Emperor Jehangir, 1000; Will
liam Methold, 1922; Rev. Hy Lord, 1880; De
Boot and De Laet, who epitomized all their pre-
decessors and Tavernier, the famous jeweler,
who travelled extensively in India in the latter
part of the seventeenth century. Some other
writers had touched on the subject, but those
here mentioned were the principal authorities
open to the readers of the Western world Rt-
ters compilation put all the available nforma-
tion into convenient and accessible form, but
added little or nothing original for which, con-
sdering the confusion engcndered by the care
lessness the free fancy of other writers, he de-
serves hearty vote of thanks. Since Taver-
nier's time good many treatises on the diamond
have been written, among which as deserving of
special notice are those of Nave, Murray, in
English of Jones, author of "EIistory and Mys-
terry of Precious StOnes;'' Barbot and Milliet de
St. Adolphe, in French, and kluge, in German.
Although the word dddndS (diamond) is fire.
quently used by earlier authors, the experts are
of opinion that the first indubitable reference to
the true diamond occurs in the poem entitled
''Astronomicon," written by the Latin poet
Manilus eighteen centuries ago, when he said,
'Sc adamas punctum lapidis pretosor auro,h
which means that compared with the diamond
gold is nowhere.
During the last dozen years several important
contributions have been added to the literature
of the diamond, and chief among these are:
(1) The Great Diamonds of the World: Their
History and Romance. By Edwin W. Streeter,
author of "Precious Stones and Gems" London!
1882.
(2) Economic Geology of India: Chapter I,
The Diamond. By V. Ball, Officiating Deputy
Superintendent of the Geological Survey of In
da. Calcutta: 1881
(3) Mani-Mala: A Treatise on Gems BY
Raja Sourendro Mohun Tagore. Calcutta: 1879
The first aud second of these are important
because they are original contributions made by
experts. The third is valuable because it puts
into English and several other languages in
convenient form condensation of all that the
old Sanscrit writers had to say about the dia-
mond The Indian Rajah, very accomplished
scholar, has done for the Sanscrit literature OF
the diamond what Karl Ritter did for the Euro.
pean literature of the diamond half a century
before. What the Orientals have to say on the