The importance attached to the discovery of diamonds in the Canyon Diablo meteorite hinges upon the well-known fact that the diamond is the purest carbon in nature. Charcoal is almost pure carbon, and, as everyone knows, common charcoal is the product of combustion, the residue from the burning of a piece of woody tissue excluded from the air. This is the everyday teaching of chemistry in the college laboratory. According to Dr. Hovey, regarding the fact that the Canyon Diablo meteorite contains diamonds, “This gem-stone diamond has been definitely proved to occur in only two meteorites, the other being a Russian fall, although many masses are known to contain carbon in the form of a soft, black powder.” The discovery of diamonds in Canyon Diablo was made in 1891, by Professor G. A. Koenig of Philadelphia, and was afterward confirmed by Dr. George F. Kunz of New York, Professor Moissau of Paris, and other investigators. In 1905, Moissau dissolved a fragment of Canyon Diablo weighing several pounds, and obtained not only recognizable crystals of the diamond, but also crystals of a mineral corresponding exactly in composition to the extremely hard artificial silicide of carbon known as carborundum. The new mineral has been named Moissauite, and this is the first time that it has been found in nature. Geology teaches us not only that charcoal and the mineral coals are different forms of that wonderful element we call carbon, but also that bituminous and anthracite coals are the transformed products of ancient vegetation, through the combined agencies of heat, enormous pressure, and the slow transmuting effect of ages. This talismanic element is ever found associated in some form with organic substance, and organic substance is life substance, animal as well as vegetable. Hence comes the all-engrossing conclusion that wherever carbon exists there organic matter exists or has existed; and, if organic matter, then its essential companion life! Does the meteoric fragment Canyon Diablo, which fell from the sky upon our planet, come from a world now or at one time the abode of life? Seemingly, we have drifted back to the original argument, Did life first come to this earth in a meteor? and we are no nearer a solution of the problem unless—as some one facetiously remarked, an enterprising individual inclosed a message within a meteor ere it took its departure for our planet from some distant world. As Flammarion says in his book on _The Plurality of Worlds_: “The problem remains the same. We want to know how life first appeared, and this problem has not been advanced in the slightest degree by the theory adopted by Lord Kelvin and Arrhenius.” But, as already stated, no one dreamed of taking the suggestion made by Lord Kelvin, seriously. THE END ----- Footnote 1: Chambers’s _Story of the Comets_, pp. 211–212. Footnote 2: