In support of the Council’s contention that the patent law procedure requires revision, the following is offered: In 1912 a U. S. Patent (No. 1,031,971) was granted on a cresol derivative, metacresyl acetate, a product described in chemical literature in 1903. When the Council inquired as to the grounds for the issuance of a patent for a substance known to science, the Patent Office replied that it was not familiar with the publication in which metacresyl acetate had been described. It seems evident that this patent would not have been issued had the application first been submitted to a government department familiar with chemical literature. An illustration of the granting of a patent on the use of well-known chemical bodies which present no discovery or originality, is the patent issued for the use of peroxids, perborates and percarbonates as ingredients of tooth powders (U. S. Patents Nos. 760,397 and 802,099). Regarding these patents The Journal of the American Medical Association (Sept. 20, 1913, p. 978) commented: “The patents held by McKesson and Robbins give this firm the exclusive right of manufacturing tooth powders containing peroxids, perborates and percarbonates. It is another illustration of the unfair monopolies that may be secured under our present patent laws.” GRANTING A PATENT TO A NOSTRUM Again in 1913 U. S. Patent No. 1,081,069 was granted to a citizen of Switzerland (a country which does not grant patents on medicinal preparations) for a “composition which is intended to be used internally and which confers to the organisms immunity against the following microbial infectious illnesses: _diphtheria, pneumonia, typhus, scarlet fever, influenza, septic infections, cerebral-spinal meningitis, syphilis, pest, cholera and tuberculosis; it is also effective in another kind of disease, viz., goiter_.” (Italics not in original). The patent specification states that “The principal of these substances is creatinin ...,” but offers no evidence whatever that this well-known chemical body has the extensive and miraculous powers claimed for it. In publishing a notice of this patent The Journal of the American Medical Association (Jan. 3, 1914, p. 54) explained: “It appears that the inventor is dead, and that his estate took out the patent. Since this great benefactor should have been, by the use of his preparation, immune to practically all diseases, he must have died of senility, although this seems hardly to have been the case.” and held: “Assuredly granting patents on such claims ought to be sufficient to show the need of a change in the methods of granting patents--at least of the methods governing the issuance of patents for medicinal products.”