tlines,
as it were, have been only roughed in; and no attempt has been made to
supply particulars, which in fact would be out of place in an essay
towards a comprehensive survey in so small a space. It is upon the
wise and skilful arrangement of details that sound and commercially
profitable patents are usually founded, rather than upon the broad
general principles of a proposed industrial advance or reform.

During the twentieth century this latter fact, already well recognised
by experts in what is known as industrial property, will doubtless
force itself more and more upon the attention of inventors. Every
specification will require to be drawn up with the very greatest care
in observing the truth taught by the fable of the boy and the jar of
nuts. So rapidly does the mass of bygone patent records accumulate,
that almost any kind of claim based upon very wide foundations will be
found to have trenched upon ground already in some degree taken up.

Probably there is hardly anything indicated in this work which is
not--in the strict sense of the rules laid down for examiners in those
countries which make search as to originality--common public property.
The labour involved in gathering the data for a forecast of the
inventions likely to produce important effects during the twentieth
century has been chiefly that of selecting from out of a vast mass of
heterogeneous ideas those which give promise of springing up amidst
favourable conditions and of growing to large proportions and bearing
valuable fruit. Such ideas, when planted in the soil of the collective
mind through the medium of official or other records, generally
require for their germination a longer time than that for which the
patent laws grant protection for industrial property. Many of them,
indeed, have formed the subjects of patents which, from one reason or
another, lapsed long before the expiration of the maximum terms.
Nature is ever prodigal of seeds and of "seed-thoughts" but
comparatively niggardly of places in which the young plant will find
exactly the kind of soil, air, rain, and sunshine which the young
plant needs.

If any one requires proof of this statement he will find ample
evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on
_Industrial Biography_, where facts and dates are adduced to show that
steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised
roads, coal gas, photography, anaesthesia, and even telegraphy