who made the first discovery of a law of nature, or the right mode of applying it had an exclusive right to apply that discovery for a certain period. It was said, however, that Patents were useful to the public, either as stimulating invention, or as insuring the publication of useful discoveries; and he did not venture to say that the time might not have been when they answered both of those purposes. Bounties and premiums might be adapted to a rude state of the arts, and an early stage in the progress of commerce, but when a nation had reached so high a degree of progress in all ingenious arts and discoveries and in trade and commerce as we had, he thought that in this department, as well as in others, the system of bounties and premiums was much more likely to be mischievous than useful. But of course one could not demonstrate that point by resting merely on an abstract proposition, and therefore he would ask the House to look at two or three things which it seemed to him would put the matter in a strong practical light. Patents might be divided into those which might be popularly called meritorious, and those which were not meritorious. The former class were certainly not one in a hundred of the total number of Patents, and the latter class were very numerous in every year. How, then, did the system work as regarded meritorious Patents? He supposed it would be admitted that among the most meritorious discoveries of recent times were the steam engine, the electric telegraph, and the screw propeller for ships. These cases furnished excellent illustrations of the way in which the Patent system worked. Take the electric telegraph. According to the evidence on the subject it was not possible, even for those who best understood the matter, to say who was entitled to the merit of that invention, so gradual and imperceptible was the natural growth and progress of knowledge and discovery in reference to it. But about 400 or 500 Patents had been taken out as marking different steps in the investigation of that subject. As to the screw propeller, he had seen a book which represented the collected Patents of one company as being 90 or 100; and he understood that the case was very much the same in regard to the steam engine. They were not dealing, in the case of the most meritorious inventions, with a true discovery by a single inventor, but with an important branch of practical knowledge at which many men were working at the same time, and in regard to which each step attained indicated the next step that was to follow, and many persons together were on the road. Well, but if they were on the road, the public would get the benefit of the discovery, and the question was whether, by enabling each person on the road to stop up the road at his particular point, they were not really retarding the progress of discovery, and throwing difficulties in the way of even the most valuable inventions.