More than once it has happened that the youngest of thirteen children has turned out a genius. It was so in the case of Sir Richard Arkwright, and it turned out to be so in the case of Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of the thirteen children of Thomas Wedgwood, a Burslem potter, and of Mary Stringer, a kind-hearted but delicate, sensitive woman, the daughter of a nonconformist clergyman. The town of Burslem, in Staffordshire, where Wedgwood saw the light in 1730, was then anything but an attractive place. Drinking and cock-fighting were the common recreations; roads had scarcely any existence; the thatched hovels had dunghills before the doors, while the hollows from which the potter's clay was excavated were filled with stagnant water, and the atmosphere of the whole place was coarse and unwholesome, and a most unlikely nursery of genius. It is probable that the first Wedgwoods take their name from the hamlet of Weggewood in Staffordshire. There had been Wedgwoods in Burslem from a very early period, and this name occupies a large space in the parish registers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; of the fifty small potters settled there, many bore this honoured name. The ware consisted of articles in common use, such as butter-pots, basins, jugs, and porringers. The black glazed and ruddy pottery then in use was much improved after an immigration of Dutchmen and Germans. The Elers, who followed the Prince of Orange, introduced the Delft ware and the salt glaze. They produced a kind of red ware, and Egyptian black; but disgusted at the discovery of their secret methods by Astbury and Twyford, they removed to Chelsea in 1710. An important improvement was made by Astbury, that of making ware white by means of burnt flint. Samuel Astbury, a son of this famous potter, married an aunt of Josiah Wedgwood. But the art was then in its infancy, not more than one hundred people being employed in this way in the district of Burslem, as compared with about ten thousand now, with an annual export of goods amounting to about two hundred thousand pounds, besides what are utilised in home-trade. John Wesley, after visiting Burslem in 1760, and twenty years later in 1781, remarked how the whole face of the country had been improved in that period. Inhabitants had flowed in, the wilderness had become a fruitful field, and the country was not more improved than the people.