Diamond: King of Precious Stones

In its dazzling beauty and the unchanging stability of its value diamond is among the best known, most beloved, and most coveted precious stones of the earth. In many respects it is the most unusual and most interesting mineral within the world of matter known to us diamond engagement rings . It is unique and attractive not only as a most costly gemstone or as the hardest of all minerals—and thus the most valuable material of modern technology—but above all as the most important evidence for the constitutional and environmental conditions at the time of its evolution in the depths of the earth, which are completely inaccessible to us and will remain so for a long time to come. There Nature endowed the diamond with the preeminent properties of a precious stone

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Diamond!

What a magic power this name has! Diamonds are symbols of brilliance, ornaments of crowns and consecrated vessels, heart's desire, and adornment of queens— diamonds have for centuries been the sum total of highest value, sublimest beauty. With diamonds are closely bound the fates of rulers and adventurers, the fortunes of peoples, families and individuals. Diamond is the precious stone which fills the starry hours of our lives with its light and forever more recalls them to us—birth, engagement, marriage, first child, jubilees, and so on.

The ancient Greeks spoke of the diamond as adamas—the steel-hard and invincible one. From this came the medieval words ademant, demant, and finally diamond. Even six hundred years before Christ, it was known to ancient man from India, where diamonds were washed out from the river gravels. All the important Indian occurrences extend along the eastern side of the Deccan Plateau. In general they may be divided into the following main fields: Golconda, with the most important finds along the Pennar and Kistna rivers; the Brahmani and Mahanadi group with alluvial mining in the rivers of the same names; the Panna group with two small primary occurrences as outcropping "pipes." Occasionally Indian diamonds are found in loose river detritus. Much more important, however, are the accumulations in higher river terraces and sediments in which the diamonds lie as a secondary deposit mens engagement rings interbedded with conglomerates and sandstones. From

time immemorial the weight of this "earth fruit"—as the Indians took it to be—has been measured on a simple balance against the seeds of the carob tree, which are called cattle. Our word carat, the unit of weight of 0.2 gm., comes from the Arabic qirat and the Greek keration, which referred to the pod of the locust tree.