rtunately making an invention.

Inventors have, on the whole, a little easier time of it in these
days--and yet not so very much easier, as the reader who has chanced,
like myself, to study law in an office where there are many 'patent
cases,' will bear witness. Eighteen hundred years ago, the inventor was
crucified--lest his malleable glass should injure Ephesian or other
silversmiths. During the middle ages, they burnt him alive. In the times
of Worcester he seldom escaped prison, for to be a 'projector' was a
charge which greatly aggravated that of treason; while in France, where
they managed these things better, according to the views of the day,
they simply cast him into a dungen among madmen. In America in the
nineteenth century he has indeed occasionally better luck, and yet in
most cases not so much better as most think. For, apart from the fact
that he must generally sell his invention to richer men endowed with
business faculty, who get nearly all the profits, and, not unfrequently,
by clapping their names to the project, all the credit, he must also
wage a weary, heart-breaking legal war on infringers of patents and
other thieves; so that by the time his time has expired, he has seldom
much to show for his brain-work.[5] 'Serves him right, he has no
business capacity,' cry the multitude. We need not look far for
examples. I am not sure that Eli Whitney, when he fell with his cotton
gin among the thieves of the South, did not fare quite as badly and
suffer quite as much as Solomon de Caus. For to be clapped fair and
square into a dungeon is at all events a plain martyrdom, with which one
can grapple philosophically or go mad _a discretion_, while to be only
half honored and nine-tenths plundered, dragged meanwhile through courts
and newspapers, may be better or worse, according to one's measure.
After all, the good old Roman plan of putting a man to death for
inventing malleable glass had its advantages--it was at least more
merciful from a Christian point of view, and would, at the present day,
save a vast amount of yards of Patent Law red tape.

_Artis et Naturae proles_, 'the offspring of Nature and of Art.' Such is
the motto with which the Marquis of Worcester prefaced his 'Century of
the Names and Scantlings of such inventions as he could in the year 1663
call to mind,' and which he presented to Government in the bold hope
that by their purchase or other disposition he might even out-go the six
or seven