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The study of this interesting subject has for more than a century been constant in Europe, and notably so during the last twenty-five years. A correct knowledge of it may now almost be called a liberal education. In some degree we have answered this question. My part of the work has been to gather where I could such historical and technical facts and such illustrations as seemed most valuable, not only to the student but to the collector.
But I have drawn from our own collections whenever it has been possible. In the preparation and engraving of the illustrations I hope the judicious critic, as well as the judicious public, will give due credit to the publishers and their artists, who, it seems to me, deserve great praise for having so well done what they have undertaken to do.
Permit me to say a word for collectors. I would like to remind the reader that there are a few—many of them young men and young women too—who have money enough for all reasonable wants, and who do not care to waste time and life in getting more money, for which they have no special uses; these persons find a perennial occupation in the study, the comparison, the purchasing, the collecting, of all that will illustrate their subject of study—their hobby. Around this subject of pottery and porcelain may be grouped, if one so pleases, all the habits, the wants, the inventions, the growths, of human society.
Some have yet a notion that the study of the politics and the fightings of man is most important; others, how man came to be an Arminian or an Augustinian; others, whether the sun is or is not gradually cooling down, and must finally cease to be, or whether, on the contrary, its flames are fed by the self-sacrificing stars.
