We make our first introduction to Wedgwood about the year 1741, as the youngest of a family of thirteen children, and as put to earn his bread, at eleven years of age, in the trade of his father, and in the branch of a thrower. Then comes the well-known small-pox: the settling of the dregs of the disease in the lower part of the leg: and the amputation of the limb, rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable occasion to record our obligations to the small-pox. But, in the wonderful ways of Providence, that disease, which came to him as a two-fold scourge, was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him from growing up to the active vigorous English workman, possessed of all his limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; it put him upon considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something else, and something greater. It sent his mind inwards; it drove him to meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was, that he arrived at a perception and a grasp of them which might, perhaps, have been envied, certainly have been owned, by an Athenian potter. Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of King Numa, receiving in a cavern, from the Nymph Egeria, the laws that were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that illness and mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made for him a cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching, meditative, and fruitful mind.