accustomed to publish his results so soon as
they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for
further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of
adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the
purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of
innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world
festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one oddly
dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept waiting
about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a rich
man's door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was
called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to
'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely explicit.

The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten's
astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great
man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.

'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn't he?'
said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views whether Sir Philip
Dass's improvements were merely superficial adaptations or whether
they were implicit in your paper. No doubt--after the manner of
inventors--you think most things that were ever likely to be discovered
are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most
subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial. Inventors
have a way of thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sort of
thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law
is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have the
novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission may or may not
stop, and all these other things you are saying in your overflowing zeal
to answer more than the questions addressed to you--none of these things
have anything whatever to do with the case in hand. It is a matter of
constant astonishment to me in this court to see how you scientific men,
with all your extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander
and wander so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more
unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain an