OF

THE PATENT LAWS

OF

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

BY

ALBERT H. WALKER.

OF THE NEW YORK BAR

FOURTH EDITION.

NEW YORK:

BAKER, VOORHIS AND COMPANY.

COPYRIGHT, 1883, 1889, 1895, and 1904.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE Constitution and the statutes of the United States, together with twelve hundred and forty-six Federal and State judicial decisions, are the principal sources from which the materials for this text-book were drawn. The most extensive treatise heretofore published on the same subject, was published in 1873; but it cited only two hundred and eighty American cases, together with one hundred and sixty-one English adjudications. The inadequacy, to the needs of the profession, of a treatise so limited in scope, was clearly impressed upon me when I entered, in 1877, upon a somewhat extended practice in patent litigation. During the next four years, I was called upon to argue several patent cases in the Supreme Court, and many others. in many of the Circuit Courts of the United States; and in preparing those arguments, I was forced to make many laborious researches, from which a complete text-book would have largely relieved me. Under these circumstances, I resolved, early in 1881, to undertake the production of a treatise so much needed by the profession. I began writing on the first day of May of that year, and soon became so much interested in the work, that I largely suspended my active practice of the law, in order to give the book the freshest of my efforts, and thus the greatest de

gree of merit consistent with my abilities. The resulting treatise covers the entire field of the patent laws of the United States, as those laws were enacted in the statutes and developed in the decisions, from the foundation of the national government in 1789, down to the first day of September, 1883. How accurately and well it covers that field, is a question which belongs to the bar and to the bench; and to the generous judgment of the bench and of the bar, I commit the result of my long and interesting labor.

HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT,
September 26, 1883.

A. H. W.