by straw. Malleable glass we have already. Why not
malleable faience?

The book before us presents the art, its history, its processes and its
results in a manner every way satisfactory. Its account is full without
being prolix. The author's taste is catholic enough. The different
styles are placed before the reader side by side, with an evident
purpose to do justice to all of them. There is little of the jargon of
the connoisseur. Marks are curtly dismissed with the sound dictum that
"the art and not the mark should be studied." Much use is made of the
engravings, which are more closely connected with the text than,
unfortunately, is generally the case in illustrated works. They are
strictly illustrations of it, and serve as good a purpose in that way as
cuts without the aid of color could well do. Nothing is more difficult
to reproduce than a first-class work in clay or porcelain. Color,
drawing, form, surface and texture present a compound of difficulties
not to be completely overcome by the resources of the graver, the camera
and the printer in colors. Only on the shelves of the museum can it be
studied understandingly. It must speak for itself. The chromo undertakes
to duplicate, with more or less success, the painting in oil or fresco,
but the vase is a picture and something more. It is the joint product of
the painter and the sculptor, and the substance whereon they bestow
their labor has a special and varying beauty of its own.

In the pages devoted to the history of American pottery we confess that
we have been chiefly attracted by its antiquities. The specimens given
of remains from all parts of the two continents show at a glance their
common origin. They all come unmistakably from the hands of the same
Indian, civilized or savage. The Moquis, the Mound-builders, the Aztecs
and the Peruvians all wrought their mother, Earth, into the same
fashion, and adorned her countenance, purified by fire, with scrolls and
colors in the same taste. The pigments employed have proved as lasting
as those in the Egyptian tombs, and the forms are often as graceful as
in a majority of the Phoenician vessels found in Cyprus. In the
representation of the human head the Peruvian artist, so far as we may
judge from these relics, excelled his rival of Tyre and Sidon.

That this will become a handbook on the subject of which it treats
cannot be doubted. If we might venture to suggest an amendment to the
second edition, it would be t