The forces of creation are yet in full play. Who can direct them?
Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker. We are permitted
not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works.
"Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me,"
says the Greatest Worker. Great profit incites to do the work noted
below.
Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for
lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it
has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was
regarded as less than half its value. Such a stone is so valuable that
$15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface. The
glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take
about ten thousand of them to make an ounce.
Why is there such a difference in value? Simply arrangement and
compactness. Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of
charcoal by arrangement and compression? Not very satisfactorily as
yet. We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make
diamonds. Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we
have not yet attained the mastery of.
We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would
enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc.,
"Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect
palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact
architectural harmony." But there is such a law and force for
crystals, if not for palaces. There is wisdom to originate and power
to manage such a force. It does not take masses of rock and stick them
together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas. Atoms
as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by
one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact
as a diamond.
The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in
making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making
of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way.
While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we
can use the diamonds themselves. Set a number of them around a section
of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down
in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore
into the rock, leaving a core. Force in water, to remove the dust and
chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any
direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what
sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go only
where they know that value lies.