"The claim of greatest antiquity that has been hitherto put forward for specimens found out of the limits of the Celestial Empire have been in favor of the little Chinese bottles, which were stated by Rossellini and others to have been found in undisturbed Egyptian tombs, dating from not less than 1800 years B. C. This claim has, however, been disallowed. The bottles are of good white porcelain, painted in colors, and bearing inscriptions. Now, we have seen that the Chinese themselves do not claim a greater antiquity for the invention of porcelain than between B. C. 206 and A. D. 87. Color-painting must have been introduced at a much later date. The inscriptions are in the grass-character, which was not invented till B. C. 48, and contain passages from poems which were not written till the eighth century of our era. They are, in fact, identical with snuff-bottles still for sale in China. Their introduction, therefore, into Egyptian tombs must have been due to the fraud of Arab workmen. The whole subject has been gone into by M. Stanislas Julien, in the preface to the 'History of King-te-chin,' as well as by others. "The next claim has been made on behalf of the _murrhine_ vases of the ancients, which are described as 'cooked in Parthian fires.' Now, it is probable that, at the commencement of our era, Chinese porcelain was not far advanced beyond pottery or stone-ware, and little superior to the so-called Egyptian porcelain. No fragments of Chinese vases have been found with Greek or Roman antiquities, nor of imitations of them in other materials, so as to correspond with the false murrhine of the ancients. It is therefore far more probable, as has been suggested by Mr. Nesbitt, in his notes on the 'History of Glass-making,' that the murrhine vases were made of agates and other hard stones, of which the colors had been modified in the East by heating and staining. The false murrhines would then be the glass bowls imitating hard stones, but with various strange tints not to be found in natural stones. "In 1171 we first find any distinct mention of porcelain out of China. In that year Saladin sent to Nur-ed-din various presents, among which were forty pieces of Chinese porcelain. "Marco Polo, traveling in 1280, visited one of the sites of the porcelain manufacture, and mentions that it was exported all over the world. It is probable that he may have been the means of calling the attention of his countrymen to this production of the far East. Many other notices from travelers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries might be cited. It was probably through Egypt that it reached Europe; at any rate, a present of porcelain vases was sent by the Sultan of Egypt, in 1487, to Lorenzo de' Medici. To the Portuguese is no doubt due the first direct importation of Chinese wares into Europe, in which they were followed by the various India companies of Holland, England, France, Sweden, etc.