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402 THE DIAMOND
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B.
C, though Hindu legends disclose a knowledge of it centuries earlier.
Pliny gathered what was known and surmised about the stone in his time,
and recorded what to-day reads like a cluster of nonsense, though his
example is emulated by instructors in the press of the twentieth
century.
Probably
no one thing has attracted more indiscriminate writing than the
diamond. Since the qualities which make it precious became known,
writers have used it to " adorn a tale " almost as frequently as fair
dames use it to multiply their charms and oftentimes quite as
grotesquely. In the early days, before its full brilliancy was
developed by cutting, when the natural octahedron, or stones with a
natural bright surface only, could be used as jewels, its " unspeakable
hardness" was the principal theme upon which writers rung the changes,
and about which they let imagination loose. Pliny asserted that not
only was it so hard that it successfully resisted when struck by an
iron hammer, but that the hammer and anvil were torn asunder by it. To
fire, it was invincible and there was but one way to subdue and break
it down and that, by first dipping it in fresh, warm, goat's blood.
Poets of the first century, Juvenal particularly, allude to it, but not
until the latter part of the fifteenth century, when the art of cutting
and polishing it was discovered, did it attract writers as generally
as other precious stones, better known, and more popular because of
their color and greater brilliancy either in the natural state, or by
processes to which the diamond would not respond.
When, however, the brilliant possibilities of the diamond were developed, and it became the desire of kings
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