h Chinese porcelain, and he also speaks of a
translucent ware made at Fostat (Old Cairo) which may well have been the
progenitor of the glassy porcelains of Persia, as well as of those made
in Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries. In A.D. 1171 the famous
Saladin sent from Cairo a present of forty pieces of Chinese porcelain
to the sultan of Babylon; and from that time onwards we have frequent
records of pieces of this exotic pottery finding their way into the
treasuries of European princes. With the renewed attention paid to the
potter's art in Europe after the 14th century, it was but natural that
efforts should be made to imitate a material so mysterious and
beautiful. But knowledge of Chinese materials and methods was _nil_, and
for a further two centuries all that Europe manufactured in the shape of
translucent pottery was the artificial porcelain made with glass, which
can only be looked upon as a substitute for true porcelain. In Italy
during the 16th century, and in France during the century from 1670 to
1770 roughly, this artificial porcelain was made and developed. At
Meissen in Saxony the famous Bottger made a true porcelain from
materials analogous to the Chinese about 1710-1712, and this manufacture
was pursued in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Europe (even in France,
the home of the artificial glassy porcelain, after 1770), so that by the
end of the 18th century, when Chinese porcelain had reached and passed
its zenith, the manufacture of a similar material was well established
in Europe, and the glassy porcelains had been generally abandoned. The
only country which offered any departure from this general rule was
England. The earliest English porcelains were derived from the French,
and, like them, owed their translucence to the use of glass. Efforts
were made at Plymouth and at Bristol (1758-1781) to introduce the
manufacture of porcelain, like the Chinese and its German counterparts,
but these failed and the English potters finally invented a third kind
of porcelain, in which calcined ox-bones were added to the clay and
ground rock to give a white translucent porcelain capable of receiving
any form of decoration. This distinctively English porcelain, perfected
about 1800, is not only the principal kind made in England in our own
times, but its manufacture has been adopted, to some extent in France,
Germany and Sweden, as well as in the United States.

It is impossible to describe these various effo