The best known and most popular of the corundum gems are ruby and sapphire ; and they are usually found close together.    The ruby is the rarer of the two and therefore more valuable. The price per carat of the sapphire is independent of the size of the gem, but the larger rubies fetch a much higher price per carat than the small ones. Rubies and diamonds are always associated together as the most precious of stones. Thus Dry den sings :

“His ample forehead bore a coronet With sparkling diamonds and with rubies set.”

Palamon and Arcite, iii. 54.

The Gaekwar of Baroda has a coat woven of gold and embroidered with diamonds and rubies which cost £25,000 sterling; the Emir of Scindia possesses a bril¬liant scarlet coat and a cap of black and gold studded with rubies and diamonds costing over £30,000 ; and many other Eastern potentates possess similar collections.

The Oriental ruby, sapphire, emerald; chrysolite, topaz and amethyst are all varieties of corundum, a mineral which is only inferior to the diamond for hard¬ness, and is found in crystalline limestone (e.g. in Burma), and in alluvial sands and gravels derived from igneous and metamorphic rocks.

When coloured, as in the case of all the varieties mentioned above, it shows a striking dichroism, being deeply coloured when viewed along the direction of the vertical axis and pale coloured when viewed at right angles to this direction. Hence the red variety, the Oriental ruby, can be distinguished by this experiment from the garnet, the Balas ruby (found in Bokhara) and the Spinel, which are cheaper, more common and more brittle, and are not corundum gems. Read the rest of this entry »

The best diamonds are usually colourless, but a blue-white shade is very rare, and one such, known as the ” Hope ” diamond, though only four and a half carats in weight, fetched £25,000. The value of stones from one to twenty carats is roughly calculated by multi plying the square of the weight in carats by the price per carat;  above twenty it is far more.

Diamonds have been discovered since in many parts of the world, and particularly in Brazil, South Africa and West Africa; and in almost all cases by accident. Each discovery has been a romance, but these stories and those of the wonderful methods and results of diamond-mining in South Africa belong to the romance of mining. Read the rest of this entry »

Two remarkable instances of the profitable commerce in diamonds are those in connection with the ” Orloff ” and ” Regent ” diamonds. The first was stolen from a Brahma temple by a French soldier, who sold it for £2000 to an English captain. He sold it to a Jew for £12,000, the Jew sold it to Prince Orloff of Russia for £90,000, and Orloff gave it to the Empress Catherine II., who rewarded the donor with a pension of £4000 a year. Read the rest of this entry »

For many years the only source of supply of diamonds was the East, and there the stone was not valued for its usefulness, but for its magnificence as a gem and ornament. Each of the great historic diamonds of the East has its own romance.
The ” Great Mogul” and the ” Koh-i-nur ” were the most treasured gems of the great Mogul conquerors of India. The first was lost during the sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah of Persia, and has never been found. Read the rest of this entry »

From time immemorial man has loved to bedeck himself with ornaments of all kinds, and every¬thing in nature which appealed to him as beautiful or mysterious, or a combination of both, has been eagerly sought both for the gratification which such possession gives, and for its commercial value in exchange for other commodities. Read the rest of this entry »