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226 THE DIAMOND
fallen
at Canon Diablo in Arizona, at Toluca in Mexico, in Tennessee, U. S.,
Arva in Hungary and at Carcote in the desert of Atacama, Chile. In the
latter, the grains of diamond were black.
The
finding of diamondiferous carbon in these meteorites, which are fused
masses, of iron principally, has done much to establish the conviction
that carbon was crystallized in the earth by heat and pressure, and by
the mental reaction of imaginative minds, has produced many fanciful
theories and much poetic writing. It has been suggested that in ages
past such meteorites, rained upon the earth and embedded there, the
matrix dissolved by the restless chemistry of Nature, may have
furnished for the discovery of later ages, mines of the indestructible
gem. This is poetic babble. The earth needs not to draw upon vagrants
of the sky, charged as it is in every pore with the element of which
diamond is its purest and most beautiful form. In earth and air; in
things animate and inanimate; in the vegetation of the earth and the
bodies of men; in the charcoal pit and the breath we constantly expire,
is that of which diamond is only a form, carbon.
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