There were probably at this time and later many others, _arcanistes_ or practical potters, working at the problem in France. M. Vogt quotes, from the _Comptes des Bâtiments du Roi_ for 1682, two singular payments for the transport of ‘terre de porcelaine’ from Le Havre to Rouen and thence to Paris. This porcelain earth had, it is stated, been previously shipped to Civita Vecchia. It has been suggested that this might refer to a cargo of kaolin sent from the East (_La Porcelaine_, p. 34). In 1695 the king granted to the Chicoineau family the privilege of making porcelain, by means of a secret process, reserving only the right previously granted to Poterat of Rouen. With the establishment, however, of the Saint-Cloud kilns we pass out of the stage of tentative experiment, and the porcelain of Saint-Cloud forms the proper introduction to the soft-paste wares of France. EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN ENGLAND.--The potters art was at a very low ebb in England in the seventeenth century. The Dutch with their Delft ware had taken up a position comparable to that held by our Staffordshire potters a century and a half later. They supplied us for many years with the ordinary crockery in use among the middle classes (indeed, in parts of Ireland such ware is still known as ‘delf’). From the scattered local potteries were produced only the roughest kinds of earthenware. But in this rude ware we see at times a certain barbaric, almost Oriental feeling for colour and decoration, giving more promise of artistic possibilities than we can find in the tame imitative work of the eighteenth century porcelain maker. Quite early in the seventeenth century, however, certainly by the time of Charles I., pottery works were established by the banks of the Thames at Lambeth and elsewhere, where successful imitations of Delft were made, probably with the assistance of Dutch workmen. Not far off, at Fulham, Dr. John Dwight experimented upon various clays and glazes, in the reign of Charles II. His is the earliest name that occurs in the history of English ceramics. In the letters-patent granted to him in 1671, he claims that ‘at his own proper costs and charges he hath invented and set up at Fulham ... several new manufactories.’ Not only was he prepared to deal with ‘the misterie of the stoneware vulgarly called Cologne ware,’ but he also lays claim to ‘the mysterie of transparent earthenware, commonly knowne by the name of porcelaine or china, and Persian ware.’ This claim is made even more definitely by his friend Dr. Plot, in the _History of Oxfordshire_, which he published in 1677. Dr. Dwight, he tells us, ‘hath found ways to make an earth _white and transparent as porcelane_, and not distinguishable from it by the eye or by experiments which have been purposely made to try wherein they disagree.’