For the first general employment of the diamond in jewellery one must look back to the fifteenth century, to the invention of the art of cutting that stone, which is generally credited, in spite of Laborde's opinion to the contrary, to Louis de Berghem of Bruges in the year 1475. From that date until the beginning of the seventeenth century every diamond, as is seen both by jewels and their designs, was one of two forms: either the "point," a four-sided pyramid produced by polishing the faces of the native octahedral crystal of diamond and making them exactly true and regular; or the "table," in which the point of the crystal is reduced to a square or oblong plane, the opposite extremity being also in plane form, but of smaller extent, with sloping faceted edges. This simple cutting did so little to augment the brilliance of the diamond that the jewellers of the sixteenth century had to depend on the _tinctura_ or foiling of the stone, in which art Cellini in his treatise, with his characteristic appreciation of his own merits, tells us that he particularly excelled. The change of taste in the seventeenth century may be attributed to the opening up of the diamond fields of Golconda on the southern borders of the State of Hyderabad, at the beginning of that century, and to the enterprise of the French travellers, Tavernier, Chardin, and others, who, during their frequent voyages to Persia and India, dealt largely in precious stones. These travellers succeeded in establishing new commercial relations, which led to the introduction into Europe of abundance of precious stones and particularly diamonds; while the narratives of their journeys, furnishing more exact knowledge of the quality and value of the products of the East, attracted towards precious stones a new interest. Owing to the abundance of material imported from the East, the market for precious stones assumed an entirely different aspect; while the quantity and beauty of the material thus at their disposal spurred on the stone-cutters towards the improvement of their technique, until at the end of the century they arrived at the true cutting of the diamond. Besides the "point," which was but rarely used, the table-cut diamond alone was employed until the commencement of the seventeenth century. About that time there came into use the "rose," a half-crystal, flat at the base and with a convex top covered with a number of small facets. Stones faceted in this manner were at first mostly small and unimportant and cut very irregularly into four or six facets.