Says Garcias: “It seems to me quite a miracle how these gems, which might be expected to be produced in the deepest bowels of the earth, and in the space of many years, should on the contrary be generated almost on the surface of the ground, and come to perfection in an interval of two or three years, for in the mines, this year for instance, at a depth of a cubit, you will dig and find diamonds: let two years pass and mining in the same place you will again find diamonds. But it is agreed that the largest are only found under the bottom of the rock.” It is singular that in the early days of the dry diggings the diggers used in joke to express the very same opinions as I have quoted above, for they often unearthed diamonds coated with a thin, dark mineral crust, which disguised merely the shape of the diamond, not the color and lustre. Many diamonds were lost through this. After some months, exposure, or the attrition caused in again disturbing the soil in which they had been lying, the whole or part of the coating was so rubbed off that the diamond and its lustre became exposed to the digger’s delighted gaze. Most probably the idea of the ancients, as to the growth of diamonds, originated in the same or a closely similar manner. Dana says: “The origin of the diamond has been a subject of speculation, and it is the prevalent opinion that the carbon, like that of coal, is of vegetable origin. Some crystals have been found with black uncrystallized particles or seams within, looking like coal, and this fact has been supposed to prove their vegetable origin.” I take the following “New facts concerning the Diamond” from the _Quarterly Journal of Science_, Oct. 1873: [Illustration: ]