Transcription

G O L D   M I N I N G   I N   C A L I F O R N I A           341

NOTICE REGARDING DIAMONDS
PRICE OF DIAMONDS 

Rough diamonds fit for Cutting are sold at £1. 13.4. to £2. the carat.
A carat is rather more than three grains, & 156 Carats equal to one ounce tray.  But if the stones are above one Carat, the square of the weight is multiplied by the price of a [?] Carat, so that, for example, a rough stone of three Carats costs 3 x 3 - £2 or £18.  It is similar with Cut diamonds, and at present {1855} the purest brilliants of one Carat fetch more than £8 - a brilliant of two Carats 2 x 2 x £8  £32 - .  Where stones are over eight or ten Carats, however, this is altered, so that they are often valued still more highly.   
Diamonds of a quarter of an ounce weight are extrordinarily [extraordinarily] Costly, but still larger are met with; and one of the largest known is that the Rajah of Mattan, in Borneo, which weighs nearly two ounces and a half; that of the Sultan of Turkey weighs two ounces; one in the Rupian Sceptre more than an ounce & a quarter -  The greatest diameter of  the last is one inch, the thickness ten lines.  The Empress Catherine II purchased it in the year 1772 from Amsterdam. & for it was paid £75,000 and an annuity of £650 -
Diamonds weighing an ounce exists also in the French & Austrian regalia.  One of the most perfect is the French, known as the Pitt or Regent diamond.  It was bought for Louis XV from an Englishman named Pitt for the sum of £135,000 sterling but it has been valued at half a million - 

CALIFORNIAN POPULATION 1802
The population of upper California according to Humboldt in his Essay on New Spain consisted in 1802 of  converted 
Indians          15.562
Other Classes 1.300   16.862  -  Forbes in his history of Upper & Lower California published in London 1839 States the number of converted Indians in the former to have been in 1831 -                                     18.683 - 
of all other classes 4.342 = 23.025 -
He expresses the opinion that the number had not varied much up to 1835, & the probability is,
there was very little increase in the white population until the emigrants from the United States began to enter the Country in 1838.. At the close of the Mexican War there were from ten to fifteen thousand Americans an Californians exclusive of Indians.  On the 1st of Jany 1850, the population consisted of American Citizens Eighty thousand Foreigners, twenty thousand, & of others fifteen thousand. 
Total 115.000

 

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