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not extend his business to inconvenient limits. All decorative
 pottery of the best class in India depends much more
on form than on colour or glazed decoration for its effect.
Where imitation of European art is attempted it is usually
a ludicrous failure. The best glazed pottery of Sind and
the Punjab boasts of a prototype in the glazed tiles of
Nineveh and Babylon. No modern innovations can much
improve it.
The production of carpets of wool, cotton, and silk is
another industry of India the antiquity of which is lost in
the mists of tradition. In this branch of art manufacture,
however, India can boast no originality. Colour and
design are all borrowed from Persia, from Assyria, and
even from Turkestan. The carpets of Kermanshah and
Kirman in Persia are unrivalled by any Indian product.
Even the stiff-patterned Turkoman work that is woven by
women near Panjdeh in the Merve district, exceeds in
excellence of workmanship and material anything to be
found in India. Besides Persia there are extensive districts
 near Herat in which carpet-making is the chief
industry. In Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and some of the
Central Asian states carpets are turned out which, whilst
they cannot boast the matchless combination of colour
and form which are found in the best Persian products,
are still admirable in quality and pleasing in effect. The
carpet trade in India has received great impetus since the
Exhibition of 1851, but in proportion as it has developed
‘n extent deterioration in workmanship and design has set
in. For much of this the jail schools of industry are
responsible. “The mongrel manufactures of the Indian
jails” still find warm support amongst the inartistic
section of the English public, and jail influence has
doubtless had a pernicious effect in all directions.
Haidarabad and Masulipatam have suffered much.
i Crude, inharmonious masses of unmeaning form ”
was, according to Sir G. Birdwood, a characteristic of
Masulipatam carpets in his time. It is, however, only
fair to add that twenty-five years has made much diference
 in the appreciation of true oriental artistic skill,