_The inventor._--Being an inventor, and the majority of my inventions being on automatic musical instruments and devices for making the controllers (which patents largely outnumber any contributed by any other individual to this art), I am well fitted to state the part these devices have taken in the advancement of music. Automatic musical instruments date back six decades or over. The barrel organ, with its cylinder and pins, was used to accompany divine worship in English churches before pianos adorned the homes of the congregation, and they have been constantly manufactured up to the present time, and are known now as orchestrions. Twenty-three years ago, at the inventions exhibition held in London, England, automatic reed organs (æolians) were exhibited by the Mechanical Organette Company, of New York, and, mechanically, I had charge of the instruments on exhibition. There were also exhibited piano players of French and German manufacture and the Miranda pianista, an English pneumatic player. Both æolians and piano players have constantly been manufactured up to the present time, inventive genius constantly laboring for perfection in operation, ease of operation, and reduction of cost to place them in reach of the masses. It is a fact beyond dispute that barrel organs are as old as or older than pianos or reed organs. I have labored twenty-three years in this industry and contributed between thirty and forty patents to the automatic-instrument industry, and have invented and patented machines that would record on controllers for automatic musical instruments the conceptions of pianists and authors, when played on an instrument by them, and I have yet to acquire a competency for my labors. The inventor's labors are always discounted by the following conditions: First. Capital and machinery to market and manufacture the invention. Second. State of the prior art as brought out in the Patent Office search. Third. The liability of infringement and the slow and tedious and expensive process of stopping it, taking testimony from Maine to California, etc. I have a case of flagrant infringement which was prosecuted four years ago and has not yet been adjudged by the circuit court--as is usual in such cases, temporary injunction being denied, which the composer or author could and does readily obtain.