or by the formed or formless devils of the material and super-material spheres. In this philosophy it is advised that a woman about to give birth to a child should refrain from wearing diamonds. Rabbi Benoni wrote in the 14th Century that the diamond was capable of producing somnambulism and spiritual ecstasy, a suggestion which was acted on in the last century by experimenters at Nancy. According to Boetius de Boodt, diamonds were of different sexes, and some Hindu writers classified them as masculine, feminine or neuter. In the Mani Mali it is stated that: an ill-shaped diamond carries danger a dirty diamond carries grief a rough diamond carries unhappiness a black diamond carries trouble a 3-cornered diamond carries quarrels a 4-cornered diamond carries fear a 5-cornered diamond carries death a 6-cornered diamond carries fortune However, the three, four and five cornered diamond would not be reckoned evil in a flawless stone of good colour. It is asserted by some of the Hindu masters that diamonds, according to their colours and qualities, appealed to the taste as sweet, sour and salty. Marbodus calls the diamond a potent magical charm for protecting the sleeper from evil dreams and the child from the dreaded goblin. The fifth Arabian Heaven, the Garden of Delights, Jannat al-Naim, is said to be composed of the purest diamonds. In the second voyage of Es-Sindibad of the Sea (commonly known as Sinbad the Sailor) in the “Thousand and One Nights,” E. W. Lane’s translation, the hero finds himself in the Valley of the Serpents: “Then I arose and emboldened myself and walked in that valley: and I beheld its ground to be composed of diamonds, with which they perforate minerals and jewels, and with which also they perforate porcelain and the onyx: and it is a stone so hard that neither iron nor rock have any effect upon it, nor can anyone cut off aught from it or break it, unless by means of the lead stone.... I then walked along the Valley, and while I was thus occupied, lo, a great slaughtered animal fell before me, and I found no one. So I wondered thereat extremely: and I remembered a story that I had heard long before ... that in the mountains of the diamonds are experienced great terrors, and that no one can gain access to the diamonds, but that the merchants who import them know a stratagem by means of which to obtain them: that they take a sheep and slaughter it, and skin it, and cut up its flesh which they throw down from the mountain to the bottom of the Valley: so descending, fresh and moist, some of these stones stick to it. Then the merchants leave it until midday, and birds of the large kind of vulture and the aquiline vulture descend to that meat, and, taking it in their talons, fly up to the top of the mountain: whereupon the merchants come to them and cry out at