Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/75

 Rh date, would invalidate any patent of protection which might be granted to him. The Patent Laws, alike in England and abroad, are intended to afford protection to 'the true and first inventor', and to him alone. In Russia, for example, protection was refused to the Bessemer steel process because the English Blue-Book containing the publication of the English patent of the same inventor was held to be an anticipation. In England, actions at law involving the question of the novelty of particular inventions have' been known from the first institution of the Patent Laws, early in the seventeenth century; and, excluding cases of fraud, etc., there would appear to be a proportion of cases of parallel invention. Many modern inventions, also, like certain folk-tales, appear to consist merely of new combinations of old elements, the novelty lying either in their rearrangement or in a different choice of elements from any previously made. Possibly some folk-tales are the result of similar attempts at novelty. From the danger of invalidation from lack of novelty, and from the heavy fees payable (until A.D. 1884), application for a patent would seem at least to imply that the inventor himself usually believed his invention to be novel; and if it can be shown that cases of parallel invention are numerous, the evidence would be of some value as regards the origin of folk-tales. It may, therefore, be well to make some examination of the public records of applications for patents and to report the result in. For example, I believe it would be found that the attempts to obtain perpetual motion, which for more than two centuries has been the subject-matter of applications for patents, mostly fall into groups of variants of a few hydraulic and mechanical radicles, the variants differing no more than many folk-tale variants." Mr. Wright adds that modern patents are of little use in this connection, on account of the rapid and wide dissemination of germ-ideas, and that when writing he had not had time to search the older records, which are not of easy reference; but that he has no doubt of being able to produce cases in point, if the evidence be thought valuable.