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Show OIUGIX OF C Alt AT WEIGHT The natives of Asia and Africa, where the largest diamond mines are located, are naturally unfamiliar with the finely graduated and precise ly exact apparatus used for weighing precious stones. But as they realized real-ized that diamonds increased in value val-ue according to their size they solved the difficulty in a manner typical of the primitive tribes. Some of them had noted that the beans of the coral cor-al tree appeared to be exactly uniform uni-form and that when dried, one of these beans would balance another within the wii,,:it of a hair. The native na-tive chiefs therefor; decreed that a "quirat" bean should be- the standard stan-dard of mea iiir.uiienl ot the weight of diamonds, and I'ncpeans who came in search of Uie, precious stones adopted the same scale, carrying the word and the weight itself back with them and later decreeing that a "carat" "car-at" 'Should: be the equivalent of 200 milligrams. The story is told that, in the days when the beans themselves were used to weigh diamonds, and Englishman, by the name of Armstrong, went into the interior of Africa with the brilliant bril-liant idea of fleecing the natives by substituting carats loaded with lead for the beans ordinarily used for the weighing. His, remains were discovered' discov-ered' near the camping place of the tribes with whom he had attempted to trade. a |