THE LAW OF COPYRIGHT. 



PIKE vs. NICHOLAS. 



In an article in tlie last number of the Canadian Journal, entitled 

 " Race Head-forms and their Expression by Measurements," reference 

 was made to a suit prosecuted in the English Court of Chancery, before 

 the Vice-Chancellor, Sir W. M. James, in which Mr. Luke Owen Pike> 

 a graduate of Oxford, and member of Lincoln's Inn, author of " The 

 English and their Origin, a Prologue to Authentic English History," 

 charged Dr. Thomas Nicholas, a professor in Carmarthen College, with 

 plagiarism, literary piracy, and appropriation of the contents of that 

 work, in the production of his " Pedigree of the English People." 

 The suit is one of great interest to literary men, as it raised questions 

 involving the practical interpretation of the law of copyright, and the 

 whole bearings of their vested rights in their own brain-work. There 

 is something curious in the very prosecution of a suit for the restitution 

 of a man's rights in reference to his own published thoughts and 

 inductions, which is calculated to arrest attention as a characteristio 

 phase in the highly artificial development of modern civilization. In 

 this respect the student of science stands at a peculiar disadvantage. 

 The novelist or other caterer for popular tastes receives in general so 

 abundant a pecuniary reward as to furnish no inadequate compensation, 

 were his literary claims in any danger of invasion. But the laborious 

 researches of the student of science rarely produce any more practical 

 return for the cost of publication, than the reputation thereby acquired. 

 It is not, therefore, to be wondered at if authors of scientific treatises 

 should be found prone to evince even undue sensitiveness in reference 

 to the misappropriation of the fruits of their literary toil. 



It chanced that the readers of this journal had a special interest in 

 some of the questions raised in the suit of Pike v. Nicholas ; for while 

 plaintiff and defendant figured in the reports of the trial as contending 

 for originality of views, or priority of publication, in reference to sundry 

 results of ethnical study and research, we had no diificulty in showing 

 that many of those had been published by us years before, in the pages 

 of this journal, as well as in original works. The occasion was a legiti- 

 mate one for reclaiming our own; for more than one contributor to this 

 journal has had repeated reason to complain of such ignoring of his 



