The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1865-06-06 00:00:00

POST POT.

One description of vessel made in the pot-works of
Staffordshire and Derbyshire —for Chesterfield, In the
latter county, produced some of the best—may not be
generally known to the readers of this volume, and
therefore a few words concerning them may appropriately
be introduced. I allude to posed t pots. These have
been made and regularly used in these and some
neighbouring counties, from an early period until the
last few years. " Posset," my readers will used to be
told, is an excellent mixture of hot ale, milk, sugar,
spices, and small slices of bread or oat-cake. In Derby-
shire and Staffordshire, and their neighbourhood, this
beverage was formerly almost, if not quite, universal
for supper on Christmas Eve, and the " posset-pot" was
thus used but once a year, and became often an heir-
loom in the family. A small silver coin, and the
wedding-ring of the mistress of the family, were
generally dropped into the posset when the guests were
assembled, and those who partook of it took each a
spoonful in turn as the " pot" was banded round.
Whichever of the party fished up the coin was con-
16:lered certain of good luck in the coming year, while
an early and happy marriage was believed to be the
certain fate of the lucky individual who fished up the
ring.
It is a most extraordinary thing not only that
Dorchester in our own times should have been con-
nected with the greatest advance made in photo-
graphy, namely, that of rendering photographs per-
manent by Mr. John Pouncy's carbon printing
process, or rather his process for printing them in
printers' ink ; but that in Dorsetshire should be
found the grave of the man who was really the
original inventor of photography altogether :
INVFATION OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

Mr. Thomas Wedgwood, who was never married,
died in the year 1805, at Gunville, Dorsetshire. He
was a man of considerable scientific attainments.
During his father's lifetime he prosecuted his studies
with his aid and that of Alexander Chisholm, and made
such progress in his researches Mto the properties of
&c., that in 1792, three yeirs before the death of
Josiah, he communicated to the Royal Society an
account of his " Experiments and Observations on the
Production of Light from different bodies by Heat and
by Attraction.' His continued experiments and re-
searches resulted in the discovery of the process of photo-
graphy, and in 1802, in conjunction with Sir Humphrey
Davy, who assisted him in his experiments, he made
those discoveries known by a paper printed in the
" Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain,"
under the title of "An Account of a Method of
Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making Profiles
by the Agency of light upon Nitrate of Silver; with
observations by H. Davy." This is the first recorded
attempt at fixing the images of the camera-obscure
(which Wedgwood appears to have used from a youth)
by the chemical influence of light. But for the death
of this deep-thinking and wonderful man (Thomas
Wedgwood), which took place about two years after
this time, doubtless the world would largely hive
benefited by his labours in this partieular field. As it
was, he died before he had succeeded in permanently
fixing the pictures he had obtained, and it was left to
later experimentalists to perfect that wonderful art
which he had discovered, and of whose success he had
laid the foundation.