materialls, way and manner of workeing the same, or of the true and certaine vse and benefitt thereof, and notwithstanding any other defects, incertainties, or imperfeccons in theise presents conteyned, or any act, statute, ordinance, provision, proclamacon, or restraint to the contrary thereof in anywise notwithstanding. “In witnes, &c. Witnes our selfe att Westminster, the Three and twentieth day of Aprill P bre de privatoe sigillo.” This was the commencement of the Fulham Pottery, whose history I am about to attempt to trace, and which has continued uninterruptedly in work for more than two centuries. Dwight appears to have been a man of considerable learning and ability. He graduated as M.A. at Christ Church, Oxford, and successively held the appointments of secretary to more than one Bishop of Chester. He seems to have long experimented upon clays and mineral products in the search after the body of which the oriental china was made, and at length to have brought those researches to a successful issue. Six years after the date of the first of his patents, Dr. Plot, the eminent antiquary and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, thus wrote of his discoveries in his “History of Oxfordshire”:-- “§ 84. Amongst arts that concern _formation of earths_, I shall not mention the making of pots at Marsh Balden and Nuneham Courtney, nor of tobacco-pipes of the white earth of Shotover, since those places are now deserted. Nor indeed was there, as I ever heard of, anything extraordinary performed during the working these _earths_, nor is there now of a very good tobacco-pipe clay found in the parish of Horspath, since the first printing of the third chapter of this history.... Let it suffice for things of this nature, that the ingenious John Dwight, formerly M.A. of Christ Church College, Oxon, hath discovered the _mystery of the stone or Cologne wares_ (such as d’Alva bottles, jugs, noggins), heretofore made only in Germany, and by the Dutch brought over into England in great quantities; and hath set up a manufacture of the same, which (by methods and contrivances of his own, altogether unlike those used by the Germans), in three or four years’ time, he hath brought it to greater perfection than it has attained where it hath been used for many ages, insomuch that the Company of Glass-sellers of London, who are the dealers for that commodity, have contracted with the inventor to buy only of his English manufacture, and refuse the foreign. “§ 85. He hath discovered also the _mystery of the Hessian wares_, and vessels for reteining the penetrating salts and spirits of the chymists, more serviceable than were ever made in England, or imported from Germany itself.