amusement, or in pursuance of scientific
investigations? If he cannot, then is an exquisitely beautiful path of
physics to be shut up for fourteen years; or if he can, then is the
licensee, a purchaser for value, to be excluded from very many sources
of pecuniary emolument? To us, the injury to the public, in this and
similar cases, appears of incomparably greater consequence than that
to the individual; but what the authorities at Westminster Hall may
say is another question. Even could the patent laws be so modified,
that the benefits derived from them could fall upon those scientific
discoverers most justly entitled, we are still doubtful as to their
utility, or whether they would contribute to the advancement of
science, which is the point of view in which we here principally
regard them. It would scarcely add to the dignity of philosophy, or
to the reverence due to its votaries, to see them running with their
various inventions to the patent office, and afterwards spending their
time in the courts of law, defending their several claims. They would
thus entirely lose the respect due to them from their contemporaries
and posterity, and waste, in pecuniary speculation, time which might
be more advantageously, and without doubt more agreeably, employed. If
parties look to money as their reward, they have no right to look for
fame; to those who sell the produce of their brains, the public owes
no debt.

We have observed recently a strong tendency in men of no mean
scientific pretensions to patent the results of their labours. We
blame them not: it is a matter of free election on their part, but we
cannot praise them. A writer in a recent number of the _Edinburgh
Review_, has the following remarks on the subject of Mr Talbot's
patented invention of the Calotype. "Nor does the fate of the Calotype
redeem the treatment of her sister art, (the Daguerreotype.) The Royal
Society, the philosophical organ of the nation, has refused to publish
its processes in her transactions. * * * No representatives of the
people unanimously recommended a national reward. * * * It gives us
great pleasure to learn, that though none of his (Mr Talbot's)
photographical discoveries adorn the transactions of the Royal
Society, yet the president and the council have adjudged him the
Rumford medals for the last biennial period."[24]

[24] _Edin. Rev._ No. 159.

The notion of a "national reward" for the Calotype scarcely requires a
remark. I