anybody
else, but you often see Indian ladies wearing necklaces and rings of
uncut rubies, sapphires, or diamonds. It isn't that Indian jewelers
didn't try. In the early days when European merchants brought back
pretty stones for sale it was noted that an occasional attempt had
already been made to polish these rough jewels. The men at the mines
must have got the idea from looking at natural crystals, especially
those of diamonds, which with their regular facets and sharp points
often do look remarkably fashioned, as if they had already been cut by
man. (Pliny described diamond crystals very accurately as colorless and
transparent, with polished facets and two points like two whipping tops
joined together at their bases.) With these as models the dealers
probably attempted to improve other diamonds that were not regularly
shaped, grinding facets where no facets were. It was a formidable task.
Nothing cuts diamond but diamond, so that one stone had to be ground
against another by hand, a process that might easily run into months
of work. There is a short cut for making some of the facets, however,
which the jewelers must have discovered by accident, possibly
disastrously. Diamonds will split comparatively easily in certain
directions. Conversely, grinding them against this grain is extremely
difficult. Nobody tries to do this even today, on a motor-run polishing
disk, because a diamond ground the wrong way simply gouges out the
disk. There are other methods.
While
the philosophical Indians were content to sell uncut or half-cut
stones, the restless Europeans got busy at improving them. About the
end of the thirteenth century a guild of gem polishers and cutters was
founded in Paris. The members probably worked more on sapphires and
rubies than diamonds, though diamonds were by no means unknown. The
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