was taken out, this time by Frye alone, ‘for a new method of making a certain ware which is not inferior in beauty and fineness, and is rather superior in strength than the earthenware that is brought from the East Indies, and is commonly known by the name of China, Japan, or porcelain ware.’ In the description of the materials employed under the vague denomination of ‘a virgin earth’ produced by the calcination, grinding, and washing of certain animals, vegetables, and fossils, we probably have, as Professor Church has pointed out, the first mention of bone-ash as a material for porcelain. According to the specification, the paste should contain four-ninths by weight of the ‘virgin earth,’ and taking this to mean bone-ash, this proportion corresponds most closely with the amount of phosphate of lime found by Professor Church in some of the fragments from the site of the works which we shall describe directly. Frye’s glaze was to be compounded from a mixture of red lead, saltpetre and sand, with the addition of a small quantity of smalt, to correct the yellow colour of the paste.[224] Thomas Frye was an artist of some standing who, towards the close of his life, ‘scraped’ some mezzotints still valued by collectors. He died in 1762, and in his epitaph it is claimed for him that he was ‘the inventor and first manufacturer of porcelain in England.’ The works of which Frye was the manager before the failure of his health in 1759 were situated close to the high road just beyond the bridge over the river Lea. Close by, in 1868, when making some excavations for a drain in the grounds of a match-factory, a number of fragments of porcelain were found, among them pieces of plain white with prunus ‘sprigs’ in relief, and others poorly decorated with under-glaze blue. Some of these fragments were evidently ‘wasters.’ With them were found some broken ‘seggars,’ and, what is still more interesting, a circular cake of frit, so that the site of the kilns must have been near at hand.[225] The model of the Bow factory, we are told, was taken from that at Canton, in China. It would be interesting to know to what building the reference is made, for it is doubtful whether porcelain was ever made at Canton. In any case, the name given to the factory, ‘The New Canton Works,’ is interesting. Here in the east of London, one was then, as now, perceptibly nearer to China and the East Indies than at Chelsea. The river and the docks are at hand, and there is indeed only one stage--a long one, it is true--between us and Canton. So at Bow we find the Oriental decoration more prevalent and surviving longer than elsewhere.