treasures
of the palaces of the Pharaohs and of Darius, or the camp of the
Ptolemies, come into Europe on the neck of a vulgar pro-consul's wife
to glitter at every gladiator's butchery at the amphitheatre; then pass
in a Gothic ox-wagon to an Arab seraglio at Seville; and so back to its
native India, to figure in the peacock throne of the Great Mogul; to be
bought by an Armenian for a few rupees from an English soldier, and so,
at last, come hither."
The
illustrations of the historic diamonds shown in this chapter have been
made from photographs of facsimiles of the stones, and are the exact
sizes of the originals.
Dana
and other mineralogists mention that diamonds in the form of cubes have
been found. While one might expect to find diamond crystals in cubic
form, as this is the fundamental form of the isometric system, still
very few specimens have come under my own observation, and none until
within the past two years. De Beers Company's Premier Mine has produced
most of these, while a few are reported as coming from Bultfontein. The
usual form of these diamonds is a cube with bevelled edges,
representing the combination oo O 2 and 00 O 00. See illustration below.
