The impression we derive from retracing the history of the past is, that the geometric figure has rarely been employed as a principal agent in decoration. We are speaking still in reference to the period we have been considering, and which is one calculated to trace with effect the progress we have in view. Prominent among the earlier specimens is the delineation of simple forms borrowed from Nature, repeated with indifferent fidelity of execution, and spread over the entire surface of the piece; whilst in later times, when the mechanical processes improved and admitted of greater accuracy, we find it restricted to light and artificially constructed borderings, so arranged as to lend additional beauty to the freedom of colour and design elsewhere displayed; and we gather, also, that if in the works of high art we find it nowhere unmixed with designs of a less formal character, there is scarcely a work that is not indebted to the grave and conventional arrangement of pattern founded upon a genuine knowledge and elucidation of its principles.
It has ever been greatly against the very general adoption of geometrically constructed figures to the purposes of porcelain, that the unaided hand of the draftsman is insufficient to insure the requisite accuracy of outline--a difficulty which even at the present day limits to a very great extent their employment in this department of art. Still, we are led to hope that the figures of snow may prove suggestive of a new basis on which to construct designs no less symmetrical than those which we have seen to proceed from other and better-known sources; whilst the rate of modern improvement in most branches of industry leads us to hope that this difficulty before long may become less formidable, and that improvements in printing will enable manufacturers to repeat with tolerable cheapness patterns which have been confined to the more costly articles of luxury. Of modern applications one in particular occurs to us--it is that they may aid in the formation of a set of ice-plates for the dessert or supper table. We can imagine the ground of the plates a clear light blue; in the centre may be the crystal, selecting in preference from those forms which are most crystalline and arborescent; among them, that most graceful of all, the water crystal, distinguishing it from the ground by shades of grey, which should be so distributed as to impart to the copy the frosted effect of the original. Around the centre, and immediately beneath or upon the raised margin of the plate, might be arranged a circular bordering, similar to that we have described as surrounding the margin of a pond on its first congelation, when the needles, becoming incrusted with crystalline deposit, assume the appearance of frosted ferns.