204 Evolution of the Mechanic Arts. 



that drove primordial man into the trees ; it was also weak- 

 ness that led him to seek for the first accessible assistance 

 outside of himself, which would be perhaps a cocoanut used 

 as a missile, but more probably a club, later to becflfme a 

 lever, and eventually to move the world, or at least subdue 

 and master it. Invention, then, is the initiative energy out 

 of which man, society and civilization have grown, and with- 

 out the persistence of which they cannot continue to ad- 

 vance. It is certainly tlie basis of freedom and of peace : 

 in the beginning, of that kind of peace for which one has 

 constantly to fight, but in the end a peace assured, and 

 blossoming into acknowledged freedom. The primordial 

 club eventually becomes the scepter, and in modern times 

 degenerates into a mere badge of social order, in the police- 

 man's locust ; it also differentiates and continues to differ- 

 entiate, until, through the lever, the inclined plane, the wheel 

 and axle, the screw, the pulley and the wedge, it develops 

 into all kinds of machinery and mechanism. In this differ- 

 entiated form it still represents the badge of authority by 

 which man reduces the forces of Nature and inferior men 

 to obedience to his will. The pen, even more than the scep- 

 ter, is our modern badge of authority. If it is true that 

 "the pen is mightier than the sword," it is because the pen 

 is, typically at least, the lever, and, like it, had its origin 

 in the club out of which the sword also was developed. 



Bouvier defines '^Invention" to be: "The act or opera- 

 tion of finding out something new ; the contrivance of that 

 which did not before exist." But what is the nature of the 

 "act of finding out"? what is newness ? and what is the 

 nature of that contrivance which "did not before exist" 

 but yet is made up of elements that have existed from the 

 foundation of the world ? By the Courts, invention, as an 

 act, has been defined in Ransom v. Mayor of New York, to 

 be, " the finding out, contriving, devising or creating some- 

 thing new and useful, which did not exist before, by an op- 

 eration of the intellect." After these simple explanations, 

 you find yourself floating on a wide ocean of definition, 

 where every particular invention is a law unto itself. 



Walker, the most recent elementary writer and authority, 

 says, "Novelty and utility must indeed characterize the 

 subject of a patent, but tliey alone are not enough to make 

 anything ])atentable ; for tlie statute })rovides that things 

 to be patented must be invented things, as well as new and 



