[5] For further details consult the authorities quoted in the Handbook of the Jermyn Street Collection, p. 5; for sections showing the relation of the beds of kaolin to the surrounding rock, see Brongniart’s Traité des Arts Céramiques, vol. i.
[6] It is to the scattered notices and essays of Mr. William Burton that we must go for information in this country. In his new work on English Porcelain he does not treat upon this side of the subject.
[7] The most complete work on the processes of manufacture is now Dubreuil’s La Porcelaine, Paris, 1885. It forms part forty-two in Fremy’s Encyclopédie Chimique. This volume brings up to date and replaces in some measure the great work of Alexandre Brongniart, the Traité des Arts Céramiques (two volumes, with a quarto volume of plates), Paris, 1844. M. Georges Vogt in La Porcelaine, Paris, 1893, gives valuable details of the processes employed at Sèvres.
[8] The cailloux of the French. This material is often described as felspar, but I think that quartz can seldom be completely absent.
[9] I should, however, be inclined to class not only much of the porcelain of Japan, but some of that made in Germany and in south-west France, rather in the ‘severe’ kaolinic than in the intermediary class of M. Vogt.
[10] We can, however, distinguish, in the tomb paintings of the Middle Empire, an earlier form without the lower table. This earlier type, moved by hand from the upper table, was that used by the Greeks at least as late as the sixth century B.C., and a similar primitive wheel is still used in India. On later Egyptian monuments of Ptolemaic time, the potter is seen moving the wheel by pressing his foot on a second lower table, as now at Sèvres and elsewhere. Both forms of wheel appear to have been used by the Italian potters of the Renaissance.
[11] This seam is often visible on vases of old Chinese porcelain, and may be taken as a sign that the object has been moulded.
[12] Porcelain in China followed, as we shall see, in the wake of the more early developed arts of the bronze-caster and the jade-carver. Hence the prevalence in the early wares of shapes unsuitable to the wheel.
[13] I think that this is a more practical division than the one made by M. Vogt and adopted by Dr. Bushell.
[14] An important exception is to be noted in the case of the firing of large vases in China.