A
passage in Pliny (xxxvii. iii. 15), "the polished hexahedral Indian
diamond thins to a point," leads us to suppose that in his time it was
known that the diamond itself was capable of wearing away other
diamonds, and therefore of facetting and polishing them.
They
say, however, that antiquity of about five thousand years since claims
a diamond which was polished on its natural planes, and belonged to
King Carna, who in India was said to have lived three thousand years
before the Christian era.
It
appears that until the time of Charles the Great the diamond, in
Europe, was only planed on its natural facets and polished ; four very
large ones of this de-scription can be seen, even now, in the buckle of
that emperor's mantle.
It appears probable that even in India they then began to cut the diamond so as to add new facets to the natural ones.
About
the year 1000 we find that in the jewels used by the great personages
of Europe were sometimes diamonds having four rectangular planes, and
one upper facet, in the form of a parallelogram, leaving the under part
in its natural state, but the stone on every side being equally
polished ; and this particular form preserves to this day the name Qf Indian, or, technically speaking, lustre of India.
The
wandering merchants who kept alive the Indo-European commerce through
the Caucasus, the Caspian, and the steppes of Asia, were perhaps the
first to bring
