Years later Josiah Wedgwood, who had every reason to know the history of the potteries from hearsay, legend and family tradition, gave an account to his partner Bentley of what John Philip Elers had done. The son, Paul Elers, had asked Wedgwood to make a medallion of his father’s head, surrounded by the motto: “Plasticis Britannicae Inventor.” Josiah Wedgwood—looking back on the long array of his ancestors, all potters born and bred in Burslem before ever Elers put his hand to the thrower’s wheel—says the motto “conveys a falsehood,” and that John Philip Elers merely _improved_ the Art. “The reason,” he writes in 1777, “for Mr Elers fixing upon Staffordshire to try his experiments, seems to be that the Pottery was carried on there in a much larger way, and in a more improved state, than in any other part of Great Britain.” “The improvements Mr Elers made in our manufactory were precisely these. Glazing our common clays with salt, which produced Pot d’Grey or Stone Ware.... I make no doubt but glazing with salt, by casting it among the ware while it is red hot, came to us from Germany, but whether Mr Elers was the person to whom we are indebted for the improvement I do not know.... The next improvement introduced by Mr Elers was the refining our common red clay by sifting, and make it into Tea and Coffee ware in imitation of the Chinese red Porcelain, by casting it in plaster moulds, and turning it upon the outside upon lathes, and ornamenting it with the tea-branch in relief.”[24] It is impossible to say why Wedgwood attributed “casting in plaster moulds” to Elers, for all the evidence goes to show that the process known technically as “casting” only came in with the introduction of alabaster “blocks” and pitcher moulds after 1730. As to the far more important and debatable point—the introduction of the process of glazing with salt—this evidence of Wedgwood’s is perhaps the most reliable that we can get. As the invention of salt glazing not only made, at one stroke, a new manufacture possible, but one that was peculiar to North Staffordshire, it may be as well to examine more closely the evidence as to its discoverer and its discovery.