Alongside the rudest and earliest chipped stone implements have been found the hollow clay dish for holding fire, or food, or water. “As the fragment of a speech or song, a waking or a sleeping vision, the dream of a vanished hand, a draught of water from a familiar spring, the almost perished fragrance of a pressed flower call back the singer, the loved and lost, the loved and won, the home of childhood, or the parting hour, so in the same manner there linger in this crowning decade of the crowning century bits of ancient ingenuity which recall to a whole people the fragrance and beauty of its past.” _Prof. O. T. Mason._ The same gifted writer, adds: “Who has not read, with almost breaking heart, the story of Palissy, the Huguenot potter? But what have our witnesses to say of that long line of humble creatures that conjured out of prophetic clay, without wheels or furnace, forms and decorations of imperishable beauty, which are now being copied in glorified material in the best factories of the world? In ceramic as well as textile art the first inventors were women. They quarried the clay, manipulated it, constructed and decorated the ware, burned it in a rude furnace and wore it out in a hundred uses.” From the early dawn of human history to its present noonday civilisation the progress of man may be traced in his pottery. Before printing was an art, he inscribed on it his literature. Poets and painters have adorned it; and in its manufacture have been embodied through all ages the choicest discoveries of the chemist, the inventor and the mechanic.