It is perhaps not generally known to what an extent the bicycle mania prevails, and how rapidly the idea has germinated, budded, and bloomed, not only throughout our own country, but in various parts of the world. In New York some ten thousand pupils are ready to graduate from the schools and appear upon the roads. In Boston there will soon be nearly as many more; while Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco count their experts by the hundred and their novices by the thousand. We hear of the bicycle in the far West and in Texas. We read that New Orleans proposes to purchase velocipedes for its fire companies, and hear of a velocipede military company in Louisville. We play velocipede music, and in our walks velocipede “Livery Stables” and “Velocipedes to Let,” greet our eyes. The shop-windows on our fashionable thoroughfares display Velocipede Hats, Velocipede Gloves, and Velocipede Shoes. The machines have become so numerous on the sidewalks of Providence, New Bedford, and other New England towns, that the stunned authorities contemplated prohibiting their use, as a nuisance. The various merits of various machines are discussed on the street corners with as much zeal as were ever the diversified merits of horse-flesh; and experts are to be heard talking of these new substitutes for legs as jockeys are wont to talk of the wind, strength, bottom, gait, and “go” of Eclipses, Dexters, and Ethan Allens. In France, fashion writers and fashion leaders rack their brains for the contrivance of velocipede costumes; velocipede clubs are formed; velocipede championships contested for at velocipede tournaments. There are not less than ten thousand machines running in the streets of Paris. They are used by postmen, government employees, students, messengers, and peddlers; and shopmen send their clerks about on machines covered with flashy advertisements. All velocipedes there are required to carry lanterns in the evening, and though we have no such regulations here, young gentlemen may be seen almost every night, in our cities, riding their velocipedes with head-lights attached. In Paris they can be seen driving at break-neck speed along the narrow stone parapet beside the Seine, and even down the hundred steps of the Trocadéro, their riders all the time indulging in gymnastic feats that would seem to invite certain destruction. At Rome, gentlemen practice the bicycle in the court-yards, and are seen riding on the Piazza de Spagna. Country trips are taken upon them in Japan, and they are no longer a novelty in the streets of the larger Chinese cities. PATENTS AND THE RIGHTS OF MANUFACTURERS.