He went so far as to say that, for years before he left the business, he and other English chemists had entirely abandoned attempts to patent their discoveries in Berlin. He had found, by sad experience, that whenever he sent over an application for a patent on a new dyestuff, or new chemical compound of importance, the German Patent Office would at once call in, for consultation, the leading German chemists who were interested in that line of work. He would get request after request for more and more detailed information about every part of the process; and then, when they had got from him every bit of information that they could, they would grant the patent to some one of his German competitors, who, in many cases at least, had never even dreamed of the thing, until Perkin had sent his application to Berlin. In fact, he said the English and French chemists considered them as rank, bare-faced pirates, and none too successful pirates at that. Two Germans however, in 1869, did work out the composition of alizarine, the dyestuff of madder, and published their discovery in the chemical journals. But while they discovered and patented one method for preparing this Alizarine from coal tar on a commercial scale, Perkin in England, and some dyestuff chemists in France discovered other methods equally good or perhaps better for producing the same identical color at less expense. So they still kept well ahead of the Germans even in that. Soon after this, in 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out. At once the French and German factories closed, at any rate for any foreign trade, and as the cultivation of madder had by that time been abandoned, Perkin found that all the Turkey red for the whole Eastern market must be dyed with his Manchester alizarine. Orders came pouring in, and in order to keep up with the demand, it would be necessary for him to greatly increase the size of his plant, and to put back into it all his savings of the past fourteen or fifteen very profitable years. This, he told me, he was unwilling to do. But, just at that moment, he was approached by a firm of Manchester business men, who had been supplying his works with some of the raw materials from coal tar (crudes and intermediates as they call them now), with an offer to buy his works and his interest in the business. He was perfectly frank and open with them, showed them his books, his profits for the past few years, his present orders and the rest, and after a little bargaining he sold out to them for a very fair price, which he immediately invested in the best of securities and on which he lived in comfort for the rest of his long and extremely happy life.