CHAPTER II.
	DIAMOND The mining of gems in this State had its origin in the finding of rolled crystals of gem value in the gold washings. In these regions have been found crystals of diamond, either loose in the soil, or taken from the washings of auriferous gravel.1 The portion of the State which has yielded these valuable substances is that known as the Piedmont region— a broad belt of country, as its name indicates, at the foot of the mountains, along the eastern base of the Blue Ridge. The rocks here are meta-morphic and crystalline, with some Cambrian beds a little farther west. There runs throughout much of this region a belt or belts of itacolumite, the so-called " flexible sandstone," which is also found in Brazil and in the Ural Mountains, and has frequently been supposed to be the matrix of diamond crystals. The presence of this peculiar rock and the occasional discovery of diamonds in adjacent districts have led to the idea that the itacolumite belt of North Carolina might prove to be a valuable diamanti-ferous region; but as yet no diamonds have actually been discovered there, and but few have been found in the loose debris of the crystalline beds. The late Prof. Frederick A. Genth, of the University of Pennsylvania, described2 the occurrence of the 2 crystalline varieties of carbon in that State,—the graphite in beds interstratified with schist or gneiss; the diamond in the debris of such rocks, associated with gold, zircon, garnet, monazite, and other minerals, and after speaking of this occurrence in connection with rocks of identical age, as a very interesting circumstance, he says: " The diamond has not been observed in North Carolina in any more recent strata, and in the itacolumite regions no diamonds have ever been found, as in Brazil; from which it appears that the itacolumite of Brazil is either simply a quartzose mica slate of similar age with the North Carolina gneissoid rocks, or, if it be contemporary with the North Carolina itacolumite, the diamonds were not produced in the same, but came from the older rocks and were redeposited with the sands resulting from the reduction to powder of these, and are now found imbedded in the same, their hardness having prevented their destruction. Seven or 8 diamonds have thus been found. They occur distributed