John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[505] the ceramic art. A connoisseur writing about the collection before it was scattered, after contrasting it with those of England, France, and Germany, expressed surprise that the best collection of all from the historical side should be in the hands of a New York amateur. Declaring that no other collection would furnish essential examples and illustrations as fully as Dana's, he added:

... They are not in the British Museum; they are not in the Louvre; and they are conspicuously absent at Dresden. Let me suppose that I have to tell my hearers about the earliest dispersion of the porcelain of China to other countries, I should be able to show them some of it; and then the nature of the object itself, coupled with the locality in which it was found, should serve for scholarly conviction and a powerful aid to memory. Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta learned a great deal from their travels; but if we only had a few of the actual objects that they tell us of, how infinitely would our knowledge of those objects be increased? Therefore, when we trace the first developments of trade and make old documents disclose that the Arabs many centuries ago invaded the remoter Eastern seas and carried back to the shores of India, to the Red Sea, and to the African coast, and to all the islands and continents that lie between, the products of China, it is mighty interesting to be able to put your hand on a piece of Chinese porcelain that somebody has dug up in Madagascar, or in Ceylon, or on the coast of Malabar, or on a Spice Island away down in the Malay Archipelago. That is precisely what I can do in the Dana Collection. There are specimens there of porcelain from all the places I have mentioned. Most of them were found by excavating graves and sites of former dwellings; and perhaps the most interesting thing in the study of porcelain is the identification of these pieces with those described in the various literature of China which deals with the remote history and manufacture of porcelain. Since Dr. Hirth, of Leipsic, and Dr. Bushell, of Peking, have taught us to translate Chinese better than