As a result, we find that a great feature in the commercial management, one that was quite peculiar to our island, was formed by the annual sales by auction, advertised beforehand in the local papers. It was by careful search through these advertisements and through the old sale catalogues that the late Mr. Nightingale was able to clear up some at least of the difficulties and misconceptions that have surrounded the history of English porcelain. The too ready acceptance of anecdotes and ‘pleasant stories,’ copied from one writer to another with occasional embellishments, has been the cause of much confusion. These have originated in many cases from the senile gossip of decayed workmen. The same may be said of the disproportionate attention given to marks, to which more care has been given than to a critical discrimination of the differences that distinguish the paste, the glaze, and the decoration of different wares. How little was known a few years ago about the composition of our English porcelains is shown by the general acceptance of the statement that Spode, about the year 1800, introduced the use of bone-ash. It is now known that nearly fifty years before that time the use of a phosphatic paste was general in England, and, according to Professor Church, in ninety per cent. of the specimens in our collections bone-ash is an essential constituent. Thus the one original discovery that we can claim for our country was either forgotten or ignored. Apart from the hard porcelain of Plymouth and Bristol, our English pastes may be divided into three classes. That first used was probably copied as closely as possible from the pastes of Saint-Cloud and Chantilly. It was a mixture of sand from Alum Bay and pipeclay from Dorsetshire, with an amount of glass, in the form of a frit, sufficient to ensure translucency. Before long the sand and clay were replaced in great measure by bone-ash, and we get the ‘natural soft paste’ especially characteristic of English eighteenth century porcelain. Finally, at the beginning of the next century Spode replaced the glassy frit by a mixture of kaolin and china-stone, retaining the bone-ash. A paste of this type has been in use ever since. Thus, in the year 1840, the ordinary commercial porcelain of Staffordshire, which in its origin was a development of the artistic wares of the eighteenth century, was made from Cornish kaolin 31 parts, Cornish china-stone 26 per cent., flint 2·5 per cent., and ‘prepared bones’ 40·5 per cent.[209] The last material is made from the roasted bones of oxen, now largely imported for this purpose from South America. The glaze on the earlier wares was essentially a silicate of lead and potash, compounded from white lead, nitre, and salt. But at present a harder glaze is used for the Staffordshire porcelain: it contains, in addition to the above substances, a considerable quantity of china-stone and china-clay, together with a little borax.