Then Sir Adolphus spoke--or, rather, he orated. He said, in his loud
and grating voice, we had that evening, and on a previous evening,
been present at the conception and birth of an Epoch in the History
of Science. Professor Schleiermacher was one of those men of whom
his native Saxony might well be proud; while as a Briton he must
say he regretted somewhat that this discovery, like so many
others, should have been "Made in Germany." However, Professor
Schleiermacher was a specimen of that noble type of scientific men
to whom gold was merely the rare metal Au, and diamonds merely the
element C in the scarcest of its manifold allotropic embodiments.
The Professor did not seek to make money out of his discovery. He
rose above the sordid greed of capitalists. Content with the glory
of having traced the element C to its crystalline origin, he asked
no more than the approval of science. However, out of deference to
the wishes of those financial gentlemen who were oddly concerned in
maintaining the present price of C in its crystalline form--in other
words, the diamond interest--they had arranged that the secret
should be strictly guarded and kept for the present; not one of the
few persons admitted to the experiments would publicly divulge the
truth about them.
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