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THE ART OF THE CUTTER
True,
there are some gem stones (not necessarily diamonds) which have
brilliant, lustrous faces as originally endowed by Nature. They display
scintillating reflections from their surfaces. But even they do not
reveal to their fullest perfection the optical properties upon which
their beauty depends. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of one
thousand, they are irregular in shape, they are pitted and flawed, they
may be chipped through some movement of the rock in which they were
formed, and above all they are covered with a filmy substance popularly
called in the cutting world a "skin," which prevents the slightest
glitter. It takes the hand of the cutter—and his instruments—to change
all that.
But
it has been only in comparatively modern times that this method of
making the diamond presentable and attractive was perfected. Diamond
cutting originated in India perhaps more than a thousand years ago, and
to the Hindu lapidaries we owe the one eternal basic principle of the
art—the use of a diamond to cut a diamond. The Indian cutters, however,
knew nothing about the science of optics. It was assumed that the
diamond, because of its extreme hardness, could not be cut. So up to
the fifteenth century all that was done was to remove the gumlike skin,
perhaps to grind down a few of the angles, and to polish the surfaces
as well as possible. We already have explained that the original
Koh-I-Noor, when it arrived in England, was unsymmetrical and dull. It
had to be cut down from 190 carats to 108.8 carats in order to get its
present brilliancy and, at that, it must be said that it isn't any too
brilliant now by present-day standards.
It
was not until the early part of the Renaissance that the diamond began
to emerge from its dim status. Lapidaries were working and
experimenting with new ways of
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