of
the jewels of Louis d'Anjou in 1368 listed some cut diamonds, but they
weren't big ones: the Indian rulers who owned the mines always kept for
themselves any finds bigger than about ten carats, so only the little
stuff was exported. Later another guild was formed in Nuremberg, not
exclusively of jewel cutters. There were some stone engravers there
too, of whom Gutenberg was one. (He could cut and polish gems with the
best of them.) The traveler Sir John Mandeville, who at this time was
making his famous journey in the East, knew what diamonds looked like,
but some of his ideas as to their source were picturesque. They were
found, he said, in the north of India, "so cold a country that for the
great cold and continual frost the water congeals into crystal (i.e.
quartz). And upon the rock of crystal grow good diamonds that are of
the color of crystal, but they are more dim colored than the crystal
and brown as oil. And they are so hard that there may be no metal
polish them ne break them. . . . And they are four cornered of their
own growing and four square. And they grow together, male and female;
and they are nourished with dew of heaven. And they engender and
conceive, as it were, in their kind and bring forth small childer, and
so they multiply and grow al-way. I have many times assayed and seen
that if a man take them with a little of the rock that they grow on, so
that they be taken up by the roots and oft sythes wet with the dew of
May, they grow ilk a year visibly, so that the small wax great." Until
a few years ago some Indian diggers held similar beliefs; perhaps they
still do, though the fact that the Russians are developing the ancient
mine at Panna may have brought them more sophistication. The great gem
authority Edwin W. Streeter wrote, "There is an erroneous impression
among
