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 notice; and in any suit for infringement by a party failing so to mark, no damages shall be recovered by the plaintiff, except on proof that the defendant was duly notified of the infringement, and continued after such notice to make, use or vend the article so patented. A penalty of not less than 100 dollars is attached to falsely marking or labelling articles as patented.

When through inadvertence, accident or mistake, and without fraudulent or deceptive intention, a patentee has claimed more than he is entitled to, his patent is valid for all that part which is truly and justly his own; provided this is a material or substantial part of the thing patented and the patentee, or his heirs or assigns, on payment of the prescribed fee ($10) disclaim the surplus age. The disclaimer must be in writing, and attested by one or more witnesses; it is recorded in the Patent Office, and is thereafter considered a part of the original specification. But no disclaimer affects any action pending at the time of its being filed, except so far as may relate to the question of unreasonable neglect or delay in filing it.

In the same circumstance, or where a patent is inoperative or invalid by reason of a defective or insufficient specification, the patentee may surrender his patent, and the commissioner of patents may, on the application of the patentee and on payment of a fee of $30, issue a new patent in accordance with the amended specification.

Uruguay (law of 12th November 1885).—The term is 3, 6 or 9 years, at the option of the applicant. There is an annual tax of $25 for every year of the privilege. The invention must be worked within a time fixed by the executive, and the working must not be discontinued for a year, on pain of forfeiture. There is no preliminary examination as to novelty.

Venezuela.—A new law was promulgated by a decree of the 19th of March 1900, but revoked in January 1901 and the old law of 1882 substituted. The term is 5, 10 or 15 years. The tax is 80 francs (bolivars) a year if the patent is for an invention or discovery, and 60 francs (bolivars) a year if it relates to an improved process. There is no preliminary examination as to novelty, nor is there any compulsory working.

International Patents.—The International Convention for the protection of industrial property was signed at Paris on the 20th of March 1883; the necessary ratifications were exchanged on the 6th of June 1884, and the Convention came into force a month later. Provision was made by sections 103 and 104 of the Patents Act 1883 for carrying out the Convention in Great Britain by orders in council, applying it from time to time to (a) British possessions whose legislatures had made satisfactory arrangements for the protection of inventions patented in Great Britain; (b) foreign states with which the sovereign had made arrangements for the mutual protection of inventions. The following governments have signed the international convention: Australia, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Ceylon, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Domingo, Servia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunis and the United States. Under the powers of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act 1890 penalties have been imposed on British subjects committing offences against the Patents, &c., Acts 1883–1888, and the orders in council issued thereunder, in Africa, East Africa, Morocco, Persia, Persian coast and Zanzibar.

An international bureau in connexion with the Convention has been established at Bern, where an official monthly periodical. La Propriété industrielle, is published. Conferences were held under the Convention at Rome in April and May 18S6, and at Madrid in April 1890. At the latter conference an important article was adopted, under which it is left to each country to define and apply “compulsory working” (exploitation) for the purposes of the convention in the sense that it chooses.

PATENTS OF PRECEDENCE. A patent of precedence is a grant to an individual by (q.v.) of a higher social or professional position than the precedence to which his ordinary rank entitles him. The principal instance in modern times of patents of grants of this description has been the grant of precedence to members of the English bar. In the days when acceptance of the rank of king’s counsel not only precluded a barrister from appearing against the Crown, but, if he was a member of parliament, vacated his seat, a patent of precedence was resorted to as a means of conferring similar marks of honour on distinguished counsel without any such disability attached to it. The patents obtained by Mansfield, Erskine, Scott and Brougham were granted on this ground. After the order of the coif lost its exclusive right of audience in the court of common pleas, it became customary to grant patents of precedence to a number of the sergeants-at-law, giving them rank immediately after counsel of the Crown already created and before those of subsequent creation. Mr Justice Phillimore was, on his appointment as a judge of the queen’s bench division (in 1897) the only holder of a patent of precedence at the bar, except Serjeant Simon, who died in that year, and who was the last of the Serjeants who held such a patent. See also.

In Canada patents of precedence are granted both by the governor-general and by the lieutenant-governor of the provinces under provincial legislation which has been declared intra vires. (Att. Gen. for Canada v. Att. Gen. for Ontario, 1898, A.C. p. 247; Todd, Parliamentary Govt. in Canada, 2nd ed. p. 333).

 PATER, WALTER HORATIO (1839–1894), English man of letters, was born at Shadwell on the 4th of August 1839. He was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a medical man, of Dutch extraction, born in New York. Jean-Baptiste Pater, the painter, was probably of the same family. Richard Pater moved from Olney to Shadwell early in the century, and continued to practise there among the poorer classes. He died while his son Walter was yet an infant, and the family then moved to Enfield, where the children were brought up. In 1853 Walter Pater was sent to King’s School, Canterbury, where he was early impressed by the aesthetic beauties of the cathedral. These associations remained with him through life. As a schoolboy he read Modern Painters, and was attracted to the study of art, but he did not make any conspicuous mark in school studies, and showed no signs of the literary taste which he was afterwards to develop. His progress was always gradual. He gained a school exhibition, however, with which he proceeded in 1858 to Queen’s College, Oxford. His undergraduate life was unusually uneventful; he was a shy, “reading man,” making few friends. Jowett, however, was struck by his promise, and volunteered to give him private tuition. But Pater’s class was a disappointment, and he only took a second in literae humaniores in 1862. After taking his degree he settled in Oxford and read with private pupils. As a boy he had cherished the idea of entering the Anglican Church, but, under the influence of his Oxford reading, his faith in Christianity became shaken, and by the time he took his degree he had thoughts of graduating as a Unitarian minister. This project, too, he resigned; and when, in 1864, he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose, he had settled down easily into a university career. But it was no part of his ambition to sink into academic torpor. With the assumption of his duties as fellow the sphere of his interests widened rapidly; he became acutely interested in literature, and even began to write articles and criticisms himself. The first of these to be printed was a brief essay upon Coleridge, which he contributed in 1866 to the Westminster Review. A few months later (January, 1867) appeared in the same review his now well-known essay on Winckelmann, the first expression of his idealism. In the following year his study of “Aesthetic Poetry” appeared in the Fortnightly Review, to be succeeded by essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola and Michelangelo. These, with other studies of the same kind, were in 1878 collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Pater was now the centre of a small but very interesting circle in Oxford. Such men as cherished aesthetic tastes were naturally drawn to him; and, though always retiring and, in a sense, remote in manner, he was continually spreading his influence, not only 