22G CEEAMTC WARE. 



them available. The Assyrians and Babylonians were simi- 

 larly circumstanced; also the Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, 

 and Romans. Observe, then, the inevitable result. Not pos- 

 sessing the raw white materials naturally, and chemical art 

 not being sufficiently advanced for producing them artificially, 

 Babylonians, Assyrians, Hindoos, Egyptians, Greeks, Etrus- 

 cans, Romans, all were limited in the progress of the ceramic 

 arts to the production of vessels more or less coloured ; that 

 colour playing upon the various changes of yellow, brown, red 

 tints, all dependent on the presence of iron oxide. 



Those wonderful races of antiquity, the Assyrians and 

 Babylonians, merit a few passing words of notice here. They 

 too, as I have said, had to content themselves, for the most 

 part, with iron-stained fictile wares : but the fragments of a 

 Babylonian brick now treasured in the Museum of Economic 

 Geology bears curious testimony to the fact that, by these 

 people in those remote days of hoary antiquity, the secret had 

 been discovered of varnishing brown or red fictile ware with a 

 white glaze. In this manner there was produced a white sur- 

 face, admitting of colour ornamentation. Slightly anticipat- 

 ing a future part of this narrative, it may be well to state, that 

 in this process of glazing coloured fictile surfaces consists the 

 secret of the ware now called ' Majolica.' 



That the Babylonians should thus have turned the flank 

 of a difficulty which they had not the power of meeting face 

 to face and conquering, is curious enough ; still more curious 

 is it, that the very glaze now existing upon the surface of the 

 fragment of Babylonian brick is oxide or rust of tin the very 

 same material subsequently employed, after the lapse of many 

 long years, by the Saracens and Italians for their Majolica ; 

 the very same material employed by Bernard Palissy in the 

 reign of Henri III., for the surface-glaze of the fictile mate- 

 rial now known as Palissy w T are. The discovery of the use of 

 the oxide-glaze by the Babylonians is one of those facts that, 

 when contemplated, makes us look with reverence on the 



