[Illustration: SOUP TUREEN AND LADLE CARVED IN PEAR-WOOD.] [Illustration: FRUIT DISH AND STAND CARVED IN PEAR-WOOD. (_At the Wedgwood Museum at Etruria._)] As interesting examples showing the versatility of designers, and that potters and silversmiths and woodworkers not only touched at many points but actually assimilated designs more proper to another technique in which they were working. The technique of the metal workers should have little to recommend its adoption by the cabinet-maker, yet we find tea caddies in Chippendale's _Director_ which have details certainly more fit to be executed as mounts by the French ormulu workers than by the English wood-carvers, even though in soft mahogany. Josiah Wedgwood availed himself of many suggestions from other fields than that of pottery. A Soup Tureen and Ladle carved in pear-wood is at the Museum at Etruria to prove this excursion of his for models. This illustration (p. 29) clearly shows a design, although executed in wood, having certain ornaments which more properly belong to the technique of the silversmith. Another carved pear-wood model is that of a Fruit Dish and Stand. Here again there peeps forth not so much the technique of the wood-carver as the peculiar and more easily obtainable ornament of the metal worker. It might be a Sheffield plated Decanter Stand or Coaster. Josiah Wedgwood's collection of shells provided him with many a model for his cream ware dishes. He has used the small flattish escallop like shells--_Pholus Æstatus_, _Pectem Japonicum_, _Area Antiquat_ and others, with great effect and crudely suggested the natural colours. In these the silversmiths helped themselves liberally to Wedgwood's models and we find innumerable single shell designs prevalent since their adoption in pottery by Wedgwood. It would similarly appear that they were equally indebted to him for another of his bold replicas of nature in the fine Dessert Centrepiece (illustrated, p. 33). As spoon-warmers and for other purposes the silversmith found this model from old Josiah's conchological collection remarkably practical and accordingly lost no time in imitating it.