o soon as he gave them to the light they ceased to be his,
and became the common property of all mankind. Captain Wilkes and his
companions spent several years in exploring the Southern Ocean, and
brought from there a vast amount of new facts, all of which became at once
common property. Sir John Franklin made numerous expeditions to the North,
during which he collected many facts of high importance, for which he had
no copyright. So with Park, Burkhard, and others, who lost their lives in
the exploration of Africa. Captain McClure has just accomplished the
Northwest Passage, yet has he no exclusive right to the publication of the
fact. So has it ever been. For thousands of years men like these--
working men, abroad and at home--have been engaged in the collection of
facts; and thus there has been accumulated a vast body of them, all of
which have become common property, while even the names of most of the men
by whom they were collected have passed away. Next to these come the men
who have been engaged in the arrangement of facts and in their comparison,
with a view to deduce therefrom the laws by which the world is governed,
and which constitute science. Copernicus devoted his life to the study of
numerous facts, by aid of which he was at length enabled to give to the
world a knowledge of the great fact that the earth revolved around the
sun; but he had therein, from the moment of its publication, no more
property than had the most violent of his opponents., The discovery of
other laws occupied the life of Kepler, but he had no property in them.
Newton spent many years of his life in the composition of his "Principia,"
yet in that he had no copyright, except for the mere clothing in which his
ideas were placed before the world. The body was common property. So, too,
with Bacon and Locke, Leibnitz and Descartes, Franklin, Priestley, and
Davy, Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith, Lamarck and Cuvier, and all other
men who have aided in carrying science to the point at which it has now
arrived. They have had no property in their ideas. If they labored, it was
because they had a thirst for knowledge. They could expect no pecuniary
reward, nor had they much reason even to hope for fame. New ideas were,
necessarily, a subject of controversy; and cases are, even in our time,
not uncommon, in which the announcement of an idea at variance with those
commonly recorded has tended greatly to the diminution of the enjoyment of
life by the