250 THE DIAMOND
chance
to buy at the sellers' price and terms. Single purchases must be to the
amount of not less than ten thousand pounds, and the terms were simply
" cash."
This
condition will probably never exist again. There are now many diamond
mines in South Africa, and though comparatively few are of sufficient
importance to affect singly the decrees of the syndicate, their
present output in the aggregate is sufficiently large, and it can be
made much larger. Some of them do not produce enough to pay the cost
of working; others yield some return on the investment, though the
output is too small to make them of material influence as factors in
the industry, but some of the new mines are greater than any heretofore
discovered, and reports indicate that more of the same character will
be opened up in other fields in the near future.
As
separate chapters will be devoted to the leading mines, only a review
of them as contributory elements of the African fields will be made in
this, to give an idea of the extent of the African fields in the past
and their condition at the present time. As heretofore explained the
term " dry diggings " includes all mines in the volcanic pipes or
chimneys, though the diamondiferous earth of the dry diggings is now
washed much more thoroughly and systematically than that of the " wet
diggings," which term is used to designate diggings in alluvial
deposits.
These
vertical dykes of diamondiferous material are peculiar to Africa and
have revolutionized diamond-mining. Prior to their discovery,
diamond-mining was an uncertainty in Africa, as in all other countries
where diamonds are-found. Diamond-mining was like
