This very week you read in the papers a judgment given by the Lord Chancellor, which contains the declaration that a person in specifying an invention may be held as preventing “the loss for a year or more to the public of the fruits of the ingenuity of many minds which commonly are working together in regard to the same invention.” The _Journal of Jurisprudence_ says well:— “The rights of the inventor are also liable to interference of another kind. A rival manufacturer invents independently the same machine, or one involving the same principle. He is then, by natural law, at liberty to publish his invention without regard to the rights of the first inventor, seeing that he did not acquire his knowledge of its powers from the latter, and experience proves that, in point of fact, the same processes are frequently discovered by different individuals independently of each other. In an age of mechanical invention, an inventor cannot deprive the world of a new process by keeping it a secret. He can at most only retard the progress of discovery by a few years.... We submit that the fundamental principle of any legislative contract between inventors and the public should be, that the right of using the invention should be open to all Her Majesty’s subjects. Exclusive privileges, conferred for the purpose of enabling patentees to divide their profits with a few favoured manufacturing establishments, are indefensible upon any recognised principles of economy. Patents are in fact, as they are in law considered to be, trading monopolies; and the interests of the public imperatively require that, as monopolies, they should be swept away.” Mr. Webster, Q.C., a high authority, says:— “I mean the discovery, for instance, of some chemical property, or the application of some property, of matter of recent discovery, or a certain effect, for instance, in dyeing; that becoming known as a chemical law, then persons rush to obtain Patents for different applications and different modifications of it.” See by my next quotations how great is the obstruction the multiplication of Patents creates, or, in the words of the Act, the “general inconvenience” they occasion. Mr. James Meadows Rendel, Civil Engineer, in 1851:— “During the twenty-five years that I have been in practice, I have frequently felt the inconvenience of the present state of the Patent-Law, particularly with reference to the excessive number of Patents taken out for frivolous and unimportant inventions, which I think are much more embarrassing than the Patents that apply to really important inventions.