we shall see, under the English statute, the title must truly describe the invention, or the patent is void. We can say, then, that a method in general, merely as such, is not patentable, or, in other words, that methods are not, universally, and without exception, subjects of patents. And the cases will illustrate what methods are, and what are not patentable. 15 66 "This expression, new manufacture," says a writer, may have either of two significations. A stocking was a new manufacture the first time one. was knit; but a stocking was again a new manufacture the first time one was made by a loom. In the first case, the thing made was new; in the other, the art of making that thing in a particular way. Accordingly in these two senses, the reader will find the word manufacture set down in Johnson's dictionary, and Webster's. This well known, double signification of the word, has, however, often most unaccountably been overlooked. Some judges, in ill accordance with other terms of the act they interpret, have insisted that a new manufacture behoves to be a new salable thing made; and they will not admit a new 16 15 Westminster Review, No. 44, April, 135, p. 247, Foster's American Edition. 16 21 Jac. 1. c. 3. method to be a new manufacture, except when that method, as in the stocking-loom, happens to be a new piece of mechanism, itself an article of sale; but when the new method constitutes only a new process, then, however valuable that process may be in manufactures, and however difficult and meritorious to discover, they will not regard it as a manufacture, and consequently not as a proper subject for a patent." In illustration of this remark, the writer refers to the case of Watt's patent, which was endangered by the doubt on the part of the judges, whether he had made what could be considered in law, an improvement "in any manner of manufacture." This doubt arose from Mr. Watt's having used the word method in the title of his invention, his patent being for a method of lessening the consumption of fuel and steam in the use of steam engines, a doubt being entertained by some of the judges whether a method was patentable. The use of this word by Mr. Watt, in his title, endangered the validity of his patent, whereas, had he called it an improvement, the doubt could not have arisen, and yet the sense would have been the same. But it will appear very satisfactorily that a method may be the subject of a patent, the doubt in this respect being, as already suggested, not whether a method may be patented, but in what sense this term is applicable to patentable subjects. In one of the cases on Watt's patent, Mr. Justice Heath defines in what sense a method is an invention within the statute, where he describes it to be a principle reduced to practice." So Mr. Justice Buller, in the same case, says that a method must be reduced to practice, in order to support a patent. He says, "the mere application or mode of using a thing was admitted not to be a sufficient ground for a patent; for on the court putting the question, whether, if a man by science were to devise the means of making a double use of a thing known before, he could have a patent for that? it was rightly and candidly admitted that he could not. The method and the mode of doing a thing are the same; and I think it impossible to support a patent for a method only, without having carried it into effect and produced some new substance."18 And Mr. Justice Grose makes the same distinction.19 And so Mr. Justice Rooke, in one of the same series of cases,20 speaking of Watt's specification, said, as to those parts of the specification which denoted intention only, and 17 Boulton v. Bull, 2 H. Bl. 481. did not state the thing to which it was to be applied, he did not think the patentee could maintain an action for a breach of them. That is, whether the question relates to an invention, a discovery, a manufacture, method, process, or principle, it must be a thing actually and practically carried into effect. Mr. Justice Eyre very clearly explains the same distinction. In Watt's case a patent was granted for a new invented method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in steam-engines. Eyre J. C. "Shall it now be said, after we have been in the habit of seeing patents granted, in the immense number in which they have been granted for methods of using old machinery, to produce substances that were old, but in a more beneficial manner, and also for producing negative qualities by which benefits result to the public, by a narrow construction of the word manufacture in the statute, that there can be no patent for methods producing this new and salutary effect, connected, and intimately connected, as it is, with the trade and manufactures of the country! This I confess, I am not prepared to say.' 9721 The same judge thus further illustrates this subject: "when the effect produced is no substance He says, 21 Boulton v. Bull, 2. H. Bl. 495. or composition of things, the patent can only be for the mechanism, if new mechanism is used, or for the process, if it be a new method of operating, with or without old mechanism, by which the effect is produced. To illustrate this. The effect produced by Mr. David Hartley's invention of a method for securing buildings from fire,' is no substance or composition of things; it is a mere negative quality, the absence of fire. This effect is produced by a new method of disposing iron plates in buildings. In the nature of things, the patent could not be for the effect produced. I think it could not be for the making the plates of iron, which when disposed in a particular manner, produced the effect; for those are things in common use. But the invention consisted in the method of disposing those plates of iron, so as to produce their effect, and that effect being a useful and meritorious one, the patent seems to have been very properly granted to him for his method of securing buildings from fire. In Mr. Hartley's method, plates of iron are the means which he employs; but he did not invent those means, the invention wholly consisted in the new manner of using, or I would rather say, of disposing a thing in common use, and which thing every man might make at his pleasure. In the nature of things it must be, that in the carrying into |