The House is aware that the Patent-office makes a classification of Patents. The classification for 1866, the latest year that could be given in the Return, shows that there are nearly 300 classes, and there were Patents granted that year affecting those classes to the number of more than thirty each on the average. Taking the manufacture and refining of sugar as a test of other classes, the Return shows that in that trade there were granted more than thirty “affecting processes or operations” (without including hundreds of others of a more general character, to which manufacturers of all sorts are subjected, as, for instance, Patents for motive power, heating, &c.). Many noteworthy matters will meet the eye of any person who examines the Return, such as the following: For medical, curative, and similar “revelations,” there were granted about 80; for improvements tending to safety, nearly 350; affecting food, about 400; affecting steam-boilers, about 160; steam-engines, about 120. But we have yet to consider the most material points in the Act. To these I now call attention. The conditions or limitations which the statute makes necessary are extremely significant. They are in these words—“Not contrary to the law nor mischievous to the State, by raising prices of commodities at home or hurt of trade or generally inconvenient.” On these words Sir Edward Coke remarks— “There must be _urgens necessitas_ and _evidens utilitas_.” What might be understood by being “generally inconvenient” in the statute, and how little disposition there was to render that disqualification a dead letter, we may gather from the following extract, which shows that saving of labour was in those early days, so far from being a recommendation, an inconvenience. Hear the same authority:— “There was a new invention found out that bonnets and caps might be thickened in a fulling mill, by which means more might be done than by the labours of fourscore men who got their living by it. It was ordained by an Act, 7 Edward VI. c. 8, that bonnets and caps should be thickened and fulled by the strength of men, and not by a fulling mill, for it was holden inconvenient to turn so many labouring men to idleness.” On which passage Mr. Farey (a gentleman eminent on Patent questions), who quotes it in an elaborate review of Patent-Law at the end of the Blue Book of 1829, the Report of the Committee on Patents for Inventions, makes the following remarks: “If this decision had been followed, it would have set aside every Patent for invention.” True, and the more’s the pity, perhaps! Let us hail the admission.