ld not spend his time in inventing.

The wealth which a valuable patent promises has been a great incentive
to the work of inventors, and has undoubtedly been a chief cause of the
great mechanical advancement of the last half century. But the state of
mechanical science has greatly changed from what it was when the clause
of the Constitution was penned which speaks of inventions as
"discoveries." The trained mechanical designer now perfects a machine to
do a given work, with almost the same certainty that it will be
successful in its operation that he would feel if the machine were an
old and familiar one. The successful inventor is no longer an alchemist
groping in the dark. His task is simply to accomplish certain results
with certain known means at his disposal and certain well-understood
scientific principles to guide him in his work. But this statement, too,
must be qualified. There are still inventions made which are the result
of a happy inspiration as well as of direct design. Not all the
principles of mechanical science and the modes of reaching desired ends
are yet known or appreciated by even the best mechanical engineers.
There is still room for inventors whose rights should be protected. The
interpreters of our patent laws have always held the theory that the use
of a natural agent or principle could not be the subject of a patent.
This is undoubtedly wise and just. The distinction should always be
sharply drawn between those existing forces of nature which are as truly
common property as air and sunlight, and the tool or device invented to
aid in their use.

Again, it is a notorious fact that the great multiplicity of inventions
has made the search to determine the novelty of any article submitted
for a patent for the most part a farce. No one is competent nowadays to
say surely of any ordinary mechanical device that it is absolutely new.
The bulky volumes of Patent-Office reports are for the most part a
hodge-podge of crude ideas, repeated over and over again under different
names, with just enough valuable matter, in the shape of the inventions
of practical mechanical designers and educated inventors, to save the
volumes from being an entire waste of paper and ink. Space, however,
will not permit us to discuss at length the faults of our patent system.
The important point for us to notice is that the patent system
establishes certain monopolies, and that these monopolies are not
always harmless. Patents