the
Mogul. Of course the real produce must be taken at double the official
estimate. Despite all precautions such is the case everywhere. The
Rajah has established an approximate average amount, and when this
descends too low he seizes one of the supposed defaulters and beheads
him or confiscates his goods.
He sells his diamonds directly to Allahabad or Benares, and of late years he has established ateliers for cutting ; these are the usual kind — horizontal wheels of steel worked by the foot.
On the Prospects of Diamond Mining in India by Europeans.
As
I have already related, in each of the three great tracts at Chennur,
at Sambalpur, and at Panna, attempts have been made by Europeans to
mine for diamonds, but in no instance have their operations proved to
be successful. How far success was deserved by the manner in which the
operations were carried on it is impossible to state. Regarding the
question, however, from a general point of view, I think it is easy to
see that there are many causes which must tend to have an unfavourable
effect upon the success of undertakings of this nature.
In
the first place, however, it may be well to premise that there is not
the least ground for supposing that there has been any real exhaustion
of the localities where mining is possible. On the contrary, the result
of the systematic geological examination of the different areas has
been to show that the diamond-bearing strata have a wider extension
there than the actual miners could have ever supposed—though not so
wide as some writers have concluded, by a process of including the most
distant localities in one tract, and then computing the total area.
