"baguette"
or baton shape, which is ideal for the purpose for which it is
intended, in connection with the modern designs in flexible jewellery.
I am, however, of the opinion that that method of cutting diamonds
deprives them of their most important quality—lustre.
There
was a time, from the middle of the eighteenth century until the
discoveries on the South African Rand, when South America supplied the
world with its diamonds, just as India had done from the earliest times
until Brazil became a great name in the diamond world. To-morrow
(figuratively speaking) the great diamonds may be coming from
Patagonia, and the day after from Antarctica, places still both remote
from industrial strife. History has already been made by the discovery
of precious minerals in unexpected localities. It may, and probably
will, be again made in the same way.
The
story of the great diamonds is an almost unending feast of romance,
tragedy and adventure, too often tinged with the sordidness of criminal
greed. Sometimes there is humour in the tale, like a bit of the private
history of the Cullinan diamond which I was told.
I
had known young Ascher of Amsterdam when he was scarcely out of his
teens. He was a shrewd, precise, staid young man, a perfect blend of
Jew and Dutchman. Yet he seemed to me to be lacking in one outstanding
Jewish trait, in that he appeared to have no sense of humour. That was
forty-five years before he had become world-famous as the head of the
great Amsterdam diamond-cut-
