Leisure hours among the gems

by Augustus C. Hamlin

At first this newly discovered mineral was pulverized, and its powdered dust used to polish diamonds and other gems, and was then sold for a few francs the karat. Lately, however, science has applied its use to new inventions; and the demand for it in its application to the drill and the saw has increased its value to several dollars the karat, and the price is still increasing. Its advantages over the crystallized varieties are very decided, and it is as hard and has no cleavage planes, and is therefore far better able to resist the effects of shock.

The only diamond known to have been found in modern times in Western Europe is that picked up in a brook in the County of Fermanagh in Ireland. Its weight was not given, but it was stated to be of a reddish cast and valued by Mr. Rundell at twenty guineas. Some mineralogists have maintained that the stone in question was not in place and was probably brought in the crop of some bird of passage from Brazil or the tropical countries of America.

To us, however, a more plausible and probable theory would be that the stone was in place, and that its presence is no more remarkable than the gold nuggets found in the same country. In fact, this instance is no more strange than the finding of the great American diamond in Virginia, which was also a solitaire and many miles below the auriferous fields whence it is supposed to have drifted. We shall not be surprised to learn of the occurrence of diamonds in other parts of Europe. Pliny ends his chapter on the diamond by stating on the authority of Scepsius that diamonds are found in Germany and in the island of Basilia along with amber.

Eastern Russia was long ago suspected of being diamondiferous; and as early as 1826 Maurice Englehardt pointed out the resemblance of the Ural districts to those of Brazil. It was, however, left to Humboldt and his companions to make known the actual occurrence of these gems in this country. For in 1829, during their visit to Siberia, they discovered several diamonds on the estates of Count Porlier, about one hundred and sixty miles west of Perm, on the western declivity of the Ural Mountains. Active search having been instituted, forty diamonds were found in the detritus on the banks of the Adolfskoi. Strange to relate, they were discovered in the gold-bearing alluvium twenty feet above the stratum containing bones of mammoths and rhinoceroses. Since this period they have also been found at several other places along the Uralian chain.

In commenting upon the occurrence of these diamonds of the Adolfskoi which are preserved in the collection of Prince Butera, some of our best geologists have come to a startling conclusion.

Humboldt, Sir Roderick Murchison, and M. Verneuil, obtaining information from different points in Siberia, have been led to the belief that the diamond in these localities was formed at a date subsequent to the destruction of the mammoths.

Since this period Colonel Helmersen has made known other points along the Uralian chain of mountains where the gem has been found, as Ekaterinsburg, Kushvinsk, and Versch-Urak. But we have no information of “placers” of any considerable extent having been discovered, or the finding of the gem in sufficient numbers to warrant systematic explorations.

Future research may reveal other localities in Siberia where this gem occurs, for the country was known to the ancients as furnishing the adamas.

Amnian in the fourth century mentions the region of Agathyrsi as one of the gem-bearing countries; and this country included the Ural Mountains and part of Siberia. It is not at all strange that the exact localities should have been forgotten during the long intervening space of time and the many political convulsions that have interrupted commercial intercourse with those far-off regions.

It was well known that Scythia furnished the ancients with gold for centuries; but in modern times all trace of the localities was lost until revealed by the researches of German miners exploring for copper and iron. Stranger still, the locality of the gold mines in Spain, so famous in ancient times, is unknown at the present day.