uct, through an astonishingly wide range. To-day the fine, plastic,
white-burning clays of the south of England are carried all over Europe
and America for the fabrication of modern wares, but that is a state of
affairs which has only been attained in recent times. Even down to the
18th century, the potters of every country could only use on an
extensive scale the clays of their own immediate district, and the
influence of this controlling factor on the pottery of bygone centuries
has never yet received the attention it deserves.[1]

_General Evolution of Pottery._--The primitive races of mankind, whether
of remote ages or of to-day, took perforce such clay as they found on
the surface of the ground, or by some river-bed, and with the
rudimentary preparation of spreading it out on a stone slab if necessary
and picking out any rocky fragments of appreciable size, then beating it
with the hands, with stones or boards, or treading it with the feet to
render it fairly uniform in consistency, proceeded to fashion it into
such shapes as need or fancy dictated. Fired in an open fire, or in the
most rudimentary form of potter's kiln, such pottery may be buff, drab,
brown or red--and these from imperfect firing become smoked, grey or
black. How many generations of men, of any race, handed on their
painfully acquired bits of knowledge before this earliest stage was
passed, we can never know; but here and there, where the circumstances
were favourable or the race was quick of observation, we can trace in
the work of prehistoric man in many countries a gradually advancing
skill based on increased technical knowledge. For ages tools and methods
remained of the simplest--the fingers for shaping or building up
vessels, a piece of mat or basket-work for giving initial support to a
more ambitious vase,--until some original genius of the tribe finds that
by starting to build up his pot on the flattened side of a boulder he
can turn his support so as to bring every part in succession under his
hand, and lo! the potter's wheel is invented--not brought down from
heaven by one of the gods to a favoured race, as the myths of all the
older civilizations or barbarisms, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek, Scythian,
and Chinese have fabled, but born from the brain and hand of man
struggling to fulfil his allotted task.

Formerly every writer on the history of pottery seemed to imagine that
the very rudest pottery must have been the invention of Egyptian,