monds known at the present day are, first, the "Orloff," or "Grand Russian," weighing 193 carats, called "The Moon of the Mountain" when it belonged to Nadir-Shah, or, according to another account, when it made one of the idol's eyes in the beautiful Brahminical temple, whence a horny-fisted French soldier stole it. It fell into the hands of Shafrass, the Man of Millions living at Balsora (1747); and, after a lapse of ten years, when reports had died away, and the scent after the missing twin of poor Monoculos had grown cold, it was offered for sale at Amsterdam, and purchased by Count Orloff for his imperial mistress. It is about the size of a pigeon's egg, of exquisite lustre but defective form. Magnificent as it is though, the Rajah of Mattan is said to possess one superior to it, and, indeed, superior to any other diamond extant. But no threats nor bribes will induce the Rajah to part with a gem which is not only the finest in the world (it weighs, or is said to weigh, 367 carats), but has also mystic powers of healing, and with the preservation of which the family fortune is inextricably interwoven: something like the Luck of Edenhall, in a more magnificent translation. Then comes the "Grand Tuscan," which has passed now into the possession of Austria, a nine-sided rose diamond weighing 139 carats, of a yellowish tint, which somewhat lessens its value, and worth 155,6821. That eighty-two pounds is a delicious piece of mineralogical precision. The "Regent"-though not the largest, yet of the purest water and most perfect shape of all the great diamonds in Europe -was stolen from the mines of Golconda, and sold to Thomas Pitt, grandfather of the Earl of Chatham, and governor of Fort St. George. He in turn sold it to the Duke of Orleans, then regent, for 92,000l., though it was worth double that sum; reserving to himself the waste caused by the cutting, which made a small fortune in moderate-sized diamonds and diamond-dust, but spending 50007. in the negotiation. After a few vicissitudes, the "Pitt" or Regent"-it has both namesreturned to the crown of France, and is now in the centre of the imperial diadem; but Napoleon wore it mounted in the hilt of his state-sword. The "Star of the South" is the largest diamond as yet brought from Brazil, and belongs to the King of Portugal. Uncut it weighed 2541 carats; cut, it is 125: it is estimated as worth three millions, and is slightly approaching to pink in hue. It was found by three Brazilian exiles, poor fellows! and brought them wealth and freedom, as it ought to have done. The grandfather of the present King of Portugal used to wear it in the rough: he had a hole bored through it, and slung it round his neck on gala-days. The "Koh-i-noor," or "Mountain of Light," is the eighth and smallest of these paragon diamonds (all diamonds weighing over a hundred carats are called Paragon); but it was originally the largest diamond ever known, weighing uncut 900 carats. It was reduced to 280 by Hortensio Borgis the Venetian diamond-cutter, who was the first to try his hand on it, and who managed to lessen it to this enormous extent, though not attempting to cut it into a brilliant. The Great Mogul, to whom it belonged, instead of paying him for his labour, fined

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him 3000 rupees, and would, in his Great-Mogulish wrath, have fined him more, had Hortensio Borgis possessed more wherewith to pay. It is believed that the Koh-i-noor and the Orloff are one and the same diamond, and that, if they could be reunited, they would make up the size and weight described by Tavernier, and prove to be this matchless gem of 900 carats which once belonged to the Great Mogul, and was the very paragon of paragons. Since the Mountain of Light came into the possession of the English it has been cut as a brilliant, whereby it has been still further diminished in weight, but enhanced in value and beauty. The old Iron Duke was the first to place it in the mill; and it took thirtyeight days to cut, working twelve hours a day without intermission.

Next to the Paragons come a few highly celebrated diamonds, of rare value and beauty, but below the paragon standard of a hundred carats. There is the "Shah of Persia," with its curious inscription of Indian possessors, now belonging to Russia-a long irregular prism weighing 86 carats; and the pear-shaped "Sancy," which was the smallest of the three possessed by Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and which now belongs to France,-the others having gone by circuitous routes, the one to the Pope and the tiara, the other to Austria and the imperial crown. For Charles the Bold, and, indeed, all his congeners, were the greatest patrons of jewels known in medieval Europe; and all the royal collections extant gained by the fall of the House of Burgundy. The Sancy was lost on the field of Nancy, where Charles had worn it, and where he lost not only his diamond but his crown and his life. Picked up by a common soldier, it was first thrown away as a piece of glass, then sold for a florin to a Swiss priest-afterwards falling into the hands of the Baron de Sancy, a Huguenot nobleman, who caused it to be conveyed to the King, Henry III. But the messenger was attacked by brigands on the way, and swallowed the gem to preserve it. The corpse was opened, and the diamond found in his stomach. Then there is the marvellously pure "Nassack” diamond, pear-shaped, and weighing 783 carats; and the beautiful brilliant, "Pigott," bought by the Pasha of Egypt for 30,000l.; and the magnificent triangular "blue diamond," which was stolen from the French regalia in the famous robbery of jewels, and never more heard of; and there are the grand crown-diamonds of Spain; and the diamonds of the imperial crown of Brazil, "beyond doubt the most splendid of any crown possession, either in ancient or modern times," according to the authoress of Lithiaka. And then there is a new diamond, lately found in the Brazils, and in the possession of Mr. Dresden; a diamond as yet unchristened, but "decidedly one of the finest and purest in colour known," says Mr. Pole: it is a large pear-shaped or triangular brilliant, weighing 76 carats, nearly the weight of the Nassack,-and will probably soon become the property of a crowned head.

The diamond-mines are well guarded every where, but sometimes thefts take place undiscovered; and sometimes even the most cunning hiding-places are found out,—as when a Negro stole a diamond weighing

two carats and hid it in the corner of his eye; but was detected. If any one is suspected of theft, he is taken to a solitary room, locked up, and given powerful emetics; for the most common place of concealment is the stomach, and the Management only does what the Negro himself would do a few hours later to obtain repossession of the gem. But notwithstanding all these precautions, and notwithstanding that all stones weighing more than two carats belong to royalty (referring, at least, to the mines of Golconda, the most celebrated and the richest in the world), yet several gems of ten, and even twenty carats, make their way into the market, and find purchasers in spite of risk and law. If a slave finds a stone weighing 17 carats, he is a free man on the spot. The mines are scientifically worked, and gems are no longer got by flinging beefsteaks down inaccessible precipices, for vultures and eagles to bring up again, with a fringe of diamonds adhering to them which was the manner in which they were procured in mythic times, according to the assertions of philosophers and Sindbad the Sailor. Diamonds and gold have always had a strange connection together, and in Brazil are found in close union. In some parts of the country, gold can be picked up in the streets after a shower of rain, and diamonds have been found entangled in the roots of vegetables, and in the crops of chickens. Diamonds are supposed to grow and ripen in the mines: thus rockcrystal, which is found in the same kind of matrix, is called the "unripe," diamond the "ripe" gem; and Madame de Barrera tells a curious story, quoted from Mr. Mawe, of a Negro who found a magnificent bit of "unripe diamond," weighing near a pound, and which for its lustre and purity was taken for the real thing. It was only when Mr. Mwe scratched the surface with a real diamond, that it was found to be nothing but a very perfect bit of rock-crystal, and worth only a handful of pence instead of a king's revenues.

The diamond is phosphoric and electric; possesses the property of simple refraction; but, in spite of its marvellous brilliancy when cut and polished, is duller than even fine quartz-crystals when uncut. Many colourless gems-as white rubies, emeralds, sapphires, &c.-have been passed off in the trade as diamonds; but they are neither so hard nor so heavy, nor would they resolve themselves into pure carbon if they were burnt, supposing that any owner chose to make that crucial experiment. Guyton Morveau, in 1772, triumphantly proved that the diamond was nothing but a combustible crystal of pure carbon, and converted a bit of iron into fine steel in the process. And lately M. Despretz has been said to have made microscopic crystals possessing all the properties of real diamonds, or crystallised carbon. But this, again, is denied. The trade of polishing and cutting diamonds is almost entirely in the hands of the Jews of Amsterdam, and about 10,000 persons are employed in it. Louis Bergheim, or Berquen, of Bruges, was the first diamond-polisher in Europe, and he performed his first feat in the year 1456. Artificial diamonds are made by fusing a siliceous base with chloride of silver, which is

also the composition, varied in proportion, of the artificial opal. The lower kinds of paste are formed of rock-crystal or fine glass thrown up by tin-foil.

Next to the diamond in hardness, beauty, and value, comes the sapphire-the holy sapphire, "which renders the bearer pacific, amiable, pious, and devout, and confirms the soul in good works," which refuses to shine for the beautifying of the unchaste or the impure, and which, by the mere force of its own pure rays, kills all noxious and venomous creatures. How to describe that soft deep blue,-deepest in the males, fairest in the females,-to which nothing living can be compared, save perhaps the exquisite glory of an Irish eye? The sapphire in its true colour is blue,-blue as an Italian heaven, blue as the deep blue sea; but it is also red and yellow and green and violet and hair-brown-such a brown as the Venetian painters loved, with a golden light striking through-and it is bluish-gray and blackish, and it is sometimes radiated and chatoyant. But when all these various colours, it is called by various names-it is oriental ruby when red; oriental topaz when yellow; oriental emerald when green; oriental amethyst when violet; adamantine spar when hair-brown; emery when in granulated masses of bluish-gray; asteria, or star-stone, when radiated; corundum when dull and dingy coloured. Thus all the finest gems are mere varieties of the sapphire, which stands next in order to the kingly diamond himself. The sapphire sometimes changes colour by artificial light, and Mr. Hope's "saphir merveilleux," which is a deep delicious blue by day, becomes distinctly amethystine at night. The finest blue sapphires come from Ceylon, which is a very island of gems; and one of the most magnificent in the civilised world is that in the insignia of the Saint Esprit, among the crown-jewels of France. The dove is formed of a single sapphire of great size and marvellous beauty, mounted on white diamonds, and surrounded by the finest suite of blue diamonds in existence. The blue diamonds are almost as intense in colour as the sapphire itself. The asteria, or star-stone sapphire, is a singularly lovely gem; grayish-blue in colour, but turn it which way you will, you see ever six rays of brilliant silver-light stream from it. Sometimes the stone is red,-when the star-rays are golden yellow; and sometimes they are purely white on a ground of red or blue. The girasol sapphire has a most beautiful play of opalescent light, pinkish, aurora-coloured, or bluish. The sapphire is pure alumina, coloured by one of the magic agents by which Nature transforms her children and masquerades her servants.

"The emeraude passeth all grene thynges of grenesse," says the old black-letter book sententiously, and with a beautiful ignorance of alumina and glucina, of sapphire and beryl. "The finest come from the flode of Paradyse terrestre," wherever that may be, and are called on earth the Stone of God; for the emerald too was a holy gem. "There be a matter of beestes that be called Gryffons that kepeth these stones emeraudes in the floode, that cometh from a Paradyse terrestre into the land of Be

heste. And these maner of beestes have iiij. feete and ij. iyen, and the body before lyke an Egle and behynde lyke a Lyon. And a maner of folkes that be named Arymples (Arimaspes?), that have but one iye in the forhede. And they seke and fynde these Emeraudes, and when they go for them they be all armed, and so they seke the sayde stones in the sayde floode of Paradyse terrestre, and there they fynde them. And the sayd Gryffons flye all about and seke these sayde folkes that have but one iye in the forhede: and they do theyr power to take away the stones from them, for they be right fearse and angry with them, that they bere them away, but these sayd folkes be so armed that the sayde fowle gryffons may do them no harme. That emeraude that is most clennest and passynge grene, he is most gentyll, precyous, and best." Echoes of these old superstitions still linger round the emerald-mines; and if the oneeyed people and the griffins have gone, there is yet living an enchanted dragon which watches over the mines of Las Esmeraldas in Peru, and prevents curious people from visiting them too narrowly; and the famous gems of Mount Zeborah are guarded by terrible genii. But nothing worse than the peril of the place itself hides in that awful rift in the Tyrolese Alps, where the earthquake has rent the hills in sunder and torn out from the darkness a very wealth of emeralds, loosely imbedded in the sides of the rock. It is a terrific venture to be swung over the abyss, and lowered down those steep precipitous sides, kept back from eternity only by the strands of a frail hempen rope: but Madame de Barrera knew a woman who had nerve enough to face the danger, and who came back from her perilous journey with a rich harvest of gems as her reward. Though the first yield of these stones came from Africa, the African mines are by no means the most prolific, nor are the African stones the finest. South America is the real nursery for emeralds; and marvellous stories are told of Montezuma's clasp, and the sacred emerald, as large as an ostrich-egg, which was the mother of all the emeralds, and desired nothing so much as the company of her young daughters, the smaller emeralds,-whereby the priests got an immense collection together, as is the manner of priests every where. It was a holy gem with them, as with the Jewish rabbis,-worn by the one in a ring, by the other in the ephod or breastplate. Cortez stole five of these emeralds from one of the temples; the first of which was cut into the form of a rose with its leaves, the second was a toy, the third a fish, the fourth a bell with its clapper of one large pear-shaped pearl, and the fifth a cup, for which a Genoese lapidary offered forty thousand ducats. And in the Temple of the Sun was found one as large as a pigeon's egg. But the mother was never found, though all her daughters were hunted up and captured. Dr. Burns speaks of an emerald parroquet, as large as life, and cut out of one single stone, which the Ameers of Scinde possessed; and is it Theophrastus who mentions two emerald columns sent to Ptolemy Philopater for his wife Arsinoë, which were three cubits broad and four cubits high; as well as an obelisk forty cubits high, and made out of forty