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FIRE IN THE EARTH
diamond. And it won't be much more than a word, since we are dealing in this book with the real diamond and not the imitation. Ever since there were precious stones efforts have been made to produce imitations or synthetics. The ancient Egyptians made quite a trade out of it. The Romans used colored glass extensively. These things are called paste and, of course, usually there is no attempt made to deceive any but the more gullible. Where all these important imita­tions or synthetics fail is in hardness. A knife point will chip them. But sometimes efforts are made to palm off such things as quartz as "Arkansas diamonds."
Many attempts have been made to produce diamonds by artificial means. Minute crystals are said to have been ob­tained by some processes, but this has never been confirmed. The achievement has been asserted, although only particles of microscopic size have been produced. The results of these experiments have proved extremely doubtful. The alleged diamonds were so small that they could not be submitted to really decisive tests. The test of hardness was mainly relied upon in one case, however; but it later was found that vari­ous carbides (silicon carbide or carborundum) had a hard­ness of over No. 9 on the scale and therefore were capable of scratching corundum.
But marshaling carbon atoms to form a pure and color­less crystal of diamond is, for the present, out of the ques­tion. That's still Nature's job. Nature may or may not abhor a vacuum; certainly it detests imitation. And so do people, because they are a part of Nature. Diamonds of microscopic size, even if real, might be interesting, but they wouldn't show up very well on the wearer. "Synthetics," it is safe to say without being serenely smug about it, belong in the class that includes the "bars of gold" turned out by the ancient alchemists.
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