The largest diamond ever discovered was found in 1905 in the Premier Mine in South Africa, which had been opened by Sir Thomas Cullinan. The rough stone, weighing 3,106 carats, about one and a third pounds, was bought by the Transvaal Government and presented to King Edward VII of England, in 1907, on his sixty-sixth birthday. The Cullinan was sent to Amsterdam to be cut. There, after months of study, the expert set the cleaving blade on the diamond and tapped it with a heavy rod. The blade broke. On the second try, the expert fainted. He recovered to find the great diamond split precisely as planned. Out of the great Cullinan came nine major gems and ninety-six smaller brilliants. The greatest of the cuttings, called the Great Star of Africa, weighs 530 carats, and is the largest cut diamond in the world. It adorns the sceptre of the British Empire. The other large stones are also part of the British Crown jewels. _The Excelsior_ Mention should be made of the Excelsior, a diamond of 995 carats, found in the Orange Free State in 1893 and, until the discovery of the Cullinan, the largest diamond known. The Excelsior was noticed by accident, seen by a native in a shovelful of gravel he was pitching onto a truck. The stone was cut in 1903 by the same firm, Asscher of Amsterdam, that later cut the Cullinan; but the cutting is unique in that all the resulting stones—twenty-one gems—are either pear-shaped or marquise. _The Regent_ The Regent Diamond, like the Blue Tavernier, was stolen from the French royal treasures at the brink of the Revolution, but unlike the others this gem was recovered and restored to its place in France. A superb stone, the diamond weighed 410 carats in 1701, when it was picked up by a slave in the Partial Mines of India. The slave, following storied precedent, gashed his leg and hid the stone in the bandage. He limped his way to the seacoast. There he offered to share the proceeds of the sale of the stone with a sea captain; but unfortunately the slave did not survive the rigors of the ocean voyage, and the ship’s arrival in Bombay found the captain in sole possession of the stone. From an Indian merchant it was bought by Thomas Pitt, then Governor of Madras, and sent to England to be cut. Political enemies bruited abroad that he had obtained the stone by questionable means; though they never got to the core of the matter, he became known as Diamond Pitt. He sold the diamond in 1717 to the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France, for about $500,000, which kept the family in affluence through several generations. But at any moment in the political careers of the great English statesman, William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the Younger—major figures in the struggles with the American colonies and the American Revolution—there might be dragged out, as a political target, that family skeleton about the coming of the Pitt Diamond to England.