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Patents and the Patent Office.

INTRODUCTORY.

Ir is a question that admits of discussion, whether the granting of patents to inventors is not as injurious to one class of persons, as beneficial to another; and whether the general good resulting therefrom, is not fully counterbalanced by the evil entailed. It is not our purpose, however, to undertake a settlement of the dispute, which has already elicited much skilful argument, and been attempted in vain by pens eminently qualified for the task. The information here sought to be conveyed, is of a more practical character, and relates to the progress of inventive genius, the manner of conducting applications in this country and in Europe, and to judicial and technical points involved. Information of the kind is much needed; for no active relation of life is without some permanent interest in the affairs of the Patent Office, which, in the scope of its jurisdiction, exerts a powerful

influence in developing or restraining the genius of the nation. This is done by the construction it gives to the laws that are enacted for the welfare of science and the protection of inventors, and by its adjudication of cases over which it exercises paramount authority, and from which there is no appeal to other tribunals.

The fact that the issuing of patents has become an almost universal custom with enlightened communities, indicates the prevalence of a master spirit, which by the age has been designated genius; but a genius that requires more mental adaptation than the employment of the hands and will, and a more intimate knowledge of the sciences than has ever before been vouchsafed to mankind, wise as the evidences of the past show the world at various periods to have been.

Genius cannot thrive in fetters. It must feel itself free; and though it may be beset by obstacles of a conventional character, these it surmounts, and derives fresh inspiration from every interruption. History is a consecutive record of tyrannies and of despotic reigns-the weak yielding to the strong, and the mind debased to ignoble dependence on power. Genius, until the spread of letters caused men to think, and thought gave birth to enterprise, rarely exhibited itself in any of the useful arts, or attained to originality over the productions of a thousand years. Its progress had been almost imperceptible from the dawn of Christianity until the close of the fourteenth century;

and before the Christian era, improvements in some of the useful arts had been fully counterbalanced by retrograde movements in others; so that the genius of riper antiquity, for a protracted lapse, remained almost stationary.

Mere ingenuity does not express the full sense or measure of genius. The Colossus of Rhodes, the Sepulchre of Mausolus, the Palace of Cyrus, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Statue of Jupiter Olympia, the Temple of Diana of Ephesus, and the Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon, were wonders of art; yet the people whose artistic ingenuity contrived them, and set them up as enduring monuments of genius, could not construct a common arch, or adapt one piece of mechanism to another. Though Archimedes, by means of an invention of his own, hurled huge rocks upon the besieging army of Marcellus, and fired the fleets of the invader by a skilful combination of lenses, neither himself nor his posterity has brought mankind under obligation for a single original discovery worth preserving. The cotton-gin will be appreciated more highly than ever, when Archimedes and his engines are forgotten; and the seven wonders of the world dwindle into insignificance, when their merits, as works of useful art, are considered in connection with the steam motion and electric telegraph, triumphs of an age still wrapt in the partial mental gloom of semi-enlightenment.

The past, down to the fifteenth century, was a period hostile to the exercise of the inventive mind

Kings held the world in abeyance; and the nobility stood between the potentate and the people. Tgnorance in the titled few, was encouraged by ignorance in the anointed head; and the masses, held fast in the iron embrace of feudal fetters, were made the subservient creatures of both in all things. But the spread of letters struck a deathblow to the empire of physical tyranny. The coming of William the Conqueror to England, and the opening of the avenues of the East by the crusades, had operated to overcome the stubbornness and lethargy of the age. Learning came to be esteemed in exalted ranks; for the martyrdom of virtue had been frustrated by the powerful resistance of Roger Bacon: and then followed a series of the conquests of reason over prejudice and superstition, which laid the foundation for the illustrious triumphs of more modern genius. The discovery of gunpowder, the successful experiment of the mariner's compass, and the establishment of the printing press, were the stupendous realizations of the inquiring mind, then first freed of its unnatural restraints. Still active traces of the feudal system remained—not the struggle of power, endeavouring to maintain itself over the weak, for that contest had ended with the fall of Warwick, the last of the barons—but of arrogant caste against the lofty aspirations of intellect. It was a war between an ignorant aristocracy and enterprise; between ranks and moneyed interests; between citizens, artists, and burghers, and titled orders. But an

age that had witnessed the annihilation of serf slavery, was not destined to close without witnessing also the spectacle of mind conquering will— the sceptre passing from the grasp of the latter into the possession of the former, by which the empire of genius became amalgamated with the empire of letters; and the star of orders and castes, eclipsed by the new sun, paled as it declined toward the horizon, and dropped from the social firmament forever.

But genius, while it successfully combated malignant opposition, still laboured in the morning twilight. Although it might now address itself with conscious power to kings and potentates, it required the broad full flood of day, in which to consummate its grandest schemes. It toiled sometimes without reward. It needed method, and failed to establish it. The pale student too often devoted himself to the vague and undefined outlines of his project, without being able to imbue the strange and mysterious inertia with life. It stood before him, in the palpable guise of reality, wanting only the sensate gift of motion. Eureka it was to the optical senses, but to these only; for it would not obey his will, and defied his sublime efforts to control it. Francis Bacon came, gifted with the sagacity, the penetration, and the intelligence of a divine preceptor, if bowed down with moral infirmities sufficient to crush one less eminent in wisdom and earnest in the advocacy of knowledge. He comprehended at a glance how genius had been

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