Let our respect and affection for our ancestors’ adored heroes save to our descendants the Liverpool pitchers bearing such honored historical names. VIII. ORIENTAL CHINA In that delightful and much-quoted book, “The China Hunters’ Club,” the final chapter is devoted to a most humorous description of the disbandment and ignominious extinction of the club through a fierce quarrel over a disputed piece of china—whether it were Chinese or Lowestoft. Could I, as did Charlie Baker in that story, label both my china of like character and this chapter “Canton-Lowestoft,” it would fitly express my feelings when I attempt to judge and write upon the old pieces of hard-paste porcelain, so common in America, called Oriental, Canton, India, or Lowestoft, according to the belief or traditions of each individual owner. I cannot give any positive rules by which to classify this china, nor any by which to judge of independent specimens. If I followed my own convictions and my own researches on this puzzling subject, I should in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred firmly state the disputed piece of porcelain to be Chinese, and I could quote in support of my views such an authority as Franks, the great china collector, who says that, “India china (that is, china made for the East India Company for European trade—what Jacquemart calls _porcelaine des Indes_) has on one hand been attributed to Japan, and on the other, by a still more singular hallucination been ascribed to Lowestoft.” He also says, “There can be no doubt that there was a considerable manufactory of porcelain at Lowestoft, but this was of the usual English soft-paste. The evidence of hard-paste having been made there is of the most slender kind.” Mr. Owens, in his “Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol,” says, with decision: