The diamond is found in the _débris_ of metamorphic rocks in many countries, and is probably one of the evolved products of the distillation of organic matter they once contained. Under peculiar circumstances it has apparently been formed by precipitation from sulphide of carbon or some other volatile carbon compound by elective affinity. Laboratory experiments have proved the possibility of producing it by such a process, but the artificial crystals are microscopic, perhaps only because a long time is required to build up those of larger size. Jet is a carbonaceous solid which in most cases is a true lignite, and generally retains more or less of the structure of wood. Masses are sometimes found that show no structure, and these are probably formed from bitumen which has separated from the wood of which it once formed part, and which it generally saturates or invests. In some cases, however, these masses of jet-like substance are plainly the residuum of excrementitious matter voided by fishes or reptiles. These latter are often found in the Triassic fish-beds of Connecticut and New Jersey, and in the Cretaceous marls of the latter State. The discovery of a quantity of hydrocarbon jelly, recently, in a peat-bed at Scranton, Pa., has caused some wonder, but similar substances (Dopplerite, etc.) have been met with in the peat-beds of other countries; and while the history of the formation of this singular group of hydrocarbons is not yet well understood, and offers an interesting subject for future research, we have reason to believe that these jellies have been of common occurrence among the evolved products of the decomposition of vegetable tissue in all ages. The fossil resins--often erroneously called gums--amber, kauri, copal, etc., though interestingly related to the hydro-carbons enumerated on the preceding pages, form no essential part of the series, and demand only the briefest notice here. _Amber_ is the resin which exuded from certain coniferous trees that, in Tertiary times, grew abundantly in northern Europe. The leaves and trunks of these trees have generally perished; but masses of their resin, more enduring, buried in the earth on the shores of the Baltic, have in the lapse of time changed physically and chemically, and have become fitted for the ornamental purposes for which they have been used by all civilized nations. _Kauri_ is the resin of _Dammara australis_, a living coniferous tree of New Zealand, and the "gum" is dug from the earth on the sites of forests which have now disappeared. _Copal_ is a commercial name given to the resins of several different trees, but the most esteemed, and indeed the only true copal, is the product of _Trachylobium Mozambicense_, a tree which grows along the Zanzibar coast, and has left its resin buried in the sands of old raised beaches which it has abandoned.