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Adamas, Diamond

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ADAMAS.
the jewellers on account of their bad shape and fulness of flaws, and skilfully subdividing them into smaller and perfect crystals.
It will naturally be asked why the ancients should have ever desired to reduce to fragments so rare a possession : but Pliny supplies a sufficient motive: " When by good luck they succeed in breaking it it flies into such small scales (crustas) that they are scarcely visible. These are in request with gem-engravers, and are mounted in iron tools,9 there being no sub­stance so hard that they cannot hollow out with the greatest ease." We must, however, suppose that they used for this purpose only the Lasque and the Bort, stones of an ugly form, and too dull to serve as ornaments; just as in our day these kinds are pounded up to make the diamond-dust used by lapidaries. The Romans, however, did not employ the stone in the form of diamond-dust, but the sharp fragments were mounted singly in an iron handle, and managed much in the same manner as the graver in cutting a design on steel; hence the great freedom of touch characterising true antique work on gems, where the artist has evidently cut away the material with an instrument ob­structed by no resistance. Natter, himself one of the most dis­tinguished gem-engravers of the last century, justly particularizes the general use of the diamond-point in an intaglio as the grand criterion that distinguishes the antique from the modern. The ancient artist having sunk his design into the gem to the depth required by the means of a blunt drill charged with emery-powder, put in all the finishing strokes, the features, the hair, the drapery, with his keen diamond-point; tho modern executes the same work in a tamer, more mechanical manner, by the edge of a rapidly revolving disk or the point of a drill, made cutting by a coat of diamond-dust and oil, and turned like a lathe by a fly­wheel, whence the name of the machine. Before the introduc-
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