AFRICAN DIAMOND FIELDS.

Thames Advertiser, Volume XX, Issue 6156, 25 July 1888, Page 3

AFRICAN DIAMOND FIELDS.

The story of the rise and development of the South African diamond fields is, in its way, scarcely less picturesque than the romantic history of the discovery of gold in California and Australia, or of that wild tale of the rise of the silver city on the flanks of a bleak mountain in Nevada. In 1867 nobody suspected the existence of diamonds in the country now known to be so " diamondiferous," to use the barbaric adjective coined by the colonists. Of gold they were aware, and there were bright dreams of the wealth which lay in copper and the gay plume 3 plucked from ostrich tails. No doubt they have since then heard that on an old map, dated 1750, the chartographer had written " Here be diamonds." There are also vague traditions of the Kaffirs having employed shining pebbles to bore holes in other stones;; but it is certain that until a certain Schalk van Niekerk saw the children of Farmer Jacobs playing with a bit of "rock-crystal" which instinct told him was too bright and too heavy to bo applied to such frivolous purposes, nobody thought much of the legend. However, when the Jacob's crystal sold for £500 there was—except Mr Gregory's remarkable essay in The Geological Magazine-no more scepticism on the subject. A " rush " ensued to the banks of the Vanl river, and there for nearly two years some very fair finds were madp by the adventurers who elected to grub among dirt, in the hope of coming upon such gems as the 288|carat stone which history has associated with the name of Mr Stewart. Barkly was the capital of this district. But in 1871, under the root of an old thorn tree on the now famous Rolesburg Kopje, or Mount Kimbeiiy, as it is called after the then Secretary of the Colonies, was found a stone, which soon transferred the diggers from the Vaal to the New Rush. De Beers, DuToits Pan and Bultfontein, which ever since have continued the centres of this lucrative branch of commerce. The New Rush is now a tolerably old one, or, as the mines are all worked by comppanics and capitalists it is no longer a rush at all. It is the present city of Kimberly and out oi the"pans" and "piwes' of the gabbio rock on which it was built something like .two and a half millions are yearly exhumed.