A curious case was tried in Beaufort West in 1884, which ended in the acquittal of the accused, a man well versed, not only in the mysteries of the I. D. B. trade, but also in the punishment attendant upon its detection. This man offered a certain Jew residing there one of these spurious diamonds for sale. This Jew would not purchase on his own judgment, but asked a friend to value the stone for him, which after buying on his advice for £280 he found out was merely a piece of glass not worth a farthing. Not living, however, in Griqualand West, where an unlicensed purchase would have been a crime, which might have consigned him to the Capetown Breakwater for fifteen years, but in the Cape Colony, where no restriction was then in force, he called in the assistance of the law, charged the man with obtaining money under false pretences, and the case came ultimately before Judge Dwyer at the circuit court held in that town. The sale by the prisoner was of course duly proved. Judge Dwyer, however, directed the jury that as the purchaser had been guided in his opinion by his friend, it was a question for them to decide whether he had been misled or not by the statement of the accused. The jury, as I said before, acquitted the prisoner. It is certainly a curious phase in this glass, or in thieves Latin “snyde diamond,” question, or, as I term it, in this internecine struggle for unlawful gain, that in this province neither the manufacturer nor the possessor of these spurious articles can be brought to justice. It is simply with them a game of “heads I win, tails you lose.” The arts and sciences were also called into play to forward the ends of this nefarious trade. The science of chemistry was even as far back as 1872 requisitioned by both legal and illegal sellers of diamonds. It had been discovered that the boiling of yellow stones in nitric acid would give them a frosted white appearance, and by this means increase their apparent value by twenty to forty shillings a carat, according to the size of the diamond operated upon. Many very knowing ones were taken in by this at the time, _the_ diamond buyer of the day, one Moritz Unger, even falling a victim to the deception. During the past thirteen years this imposition has been spasmodically revived, although at the time (1872) it was thought that the exposure would once and forever warn the diamond burner that his “little game was up.” Although no community can hope to succeed whose prosperity depends upon unlawful enterprise, yet it is a fact that this new law, although it has failed to diminish diamond stealing one iota, has yet driven away the very men who formerly used to extravagantly patronize the retail stores, hotels, and theatres of the place, whilst Capetown and Port Elizabeth until quite recently (session of 1885) reaped the profits of this disgraceful and debasing trade.