Chinese or some other distinct race from which the knowledge radiated to
all the other races of the prehistoric world. No conception could be
more erroneous. Since the middle of the 19th century research has
established beyond doubt that wherever clay was found men became potters
of a sort, just as they became hunters, carpenters, smiths, &c., by
sheer force of need and slowly-gathered tradition. The not yet exploded
view that Egypt or Assyria was the special cradle of this art, and that
the pottery of the Greeks and Romans directly descended from such a
parent stock, cannot survive in view of the incontestable evidence that
pottery was made by the prehistoric peoples of what we now call Greece,
Italy, Spain and other countries, long before they were aware that any
other peoples lived on the earth than themselves.

For centuries this simple hand-made pottery was hardened by drying in
the sun, so that it would serve for the storage of dried grain, &c., but
the increasing use of fire would soon bring out the amazing fact that a
baked clay vessel became as hard as stone. Then, too, came the knowledge
that even in one district all the clays did not fire to the same colour,
and colour decoration arose, in a rude daubing or smearing of some clay
or earth (a ruddle or bole perhaps), which was found to give a bright
red or buff colour on vessels shaped in a duller-coloured clay--most
precious of all were little deposits of white clay which kept their
purity unsullied through the fire,--and by these primitive means the
races of the dawn made their wares. On this substructure all the pottery
of the last four thousand years has been built, for behind all Egyptian,
Greek or Chinese pottery we find the same primitive foundations.

We now reach the beginnings of recorded history, and as the great
nations of the past emerge from the shadows they each develop the
potter's art in an individual way. The Egyptians evolve schemes of
glowing colour--brilliant glazes fired on objects, shaped in sand held
together with a little clay, or actually carved from rocks or stones;
the Greeks produce their marvels of plastic form, and then, excited by
their growing skill in metal work, turn the plastic clay into imitations
of metal forms. These nations are overthrown, and the Romans spread some
knowledge--only a tincture, it must be confessed--over all the lands
they hold in fee; and from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from Egypt to
the Wall of Hadr