The year 1780, the date when the first opening of the retail business took place, was the turning-point in the history of the factory. Müller was acclaimed as a genius by his countrymen. It was proposed that a statue should be erected to his honour--and this in his lifetime. A wave of enthusiasm found an outlet in Latin poems to "the man who had done so much for his king and country." It is exceptional to find such contemporary honour bestowed on a potter. Rarely is a man a prophet in his own country. But happily Müller lived to wear the laurel wreath. "What honour," writes a contemporary, "this industry has brought its founder! I was enraptured with the things which I saw. How could I have dreamed that these could be made by a Dane and in my native land!" [Illustration: COFFEE CUPS. Painted in overglaze colours with blue border richly gilded. Rose and spray in natural colours. Group of cavalry in rich uniform, in colours.] We catch an insight into Müller's methods from a letter he wrote, when eighty years of age, to Boye, a subsequent director, who had suggested the use of some pieces of new apparatus for the laboratory. Old Müller wrote as follows: "I fail to see the use or necessity of the thermometer, eudiometer, or hydrometer. I have never found it necessary to apply such exact learning in the manufacture of porcelain, and ideas such as these appear to me to be absolutely absurd." While allowance must be made for Müller's advanced age and his hypersensitiveness towards his successors, it is of great interest to speculate upon his point of view. Man of science that he was, his deprecatory regard for these instruments seems to denote that his technique was arrived at by practical rule-of-thumb methods, dependent upon personal exactitude rather than upon formulæ. It is idle to scoff at Müller's conservatism, for science has yet to unravel the secret of the lost art of tempering the Damascene blade and the subtleties of the potter's art of the K'ang Hsi period in the single coloured glazes, _la qualité maîtresse de la céramique_, the delicacies of the rare _peau de pêche_, the _famille rose_, and the _famille verte_. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century days the methods of Chinese potters were as unscientific as those defended by Müller, but the results are "not of an age, but for all time." And Müller's results stand the test of intense criticism; they are hitherto inimitable.