46 
Mr. Riley presented the following paper: 
GOVERNMENT WORK AND THE PATENT OFFICE. 
By C. V. RILey, Washington, D.C. 
[ Author’s abstract. } 
The paper was based on a patent recently obtained by three parties 
in California for the treatment of trees by hydrocyanic acid gas for 
the destruction of scale-insects and other insects that injuriously affect 
trees. It reviewed at length the efforts of the Department in this line 
of investigation and showed conclusively that this gas treatment had 
originated and been perfected by one of the agents of the Division of 
Entomology, who had, in fact, for the past five years, been carrying on a 
series of experiments in this particular line under the author’s direction; 
that so soon as the treatment came to be recognized as of the greatest 
utility and perfected so that it was cheap and available to all needing 
to use it, application for a patent was made by the parties in question, 
and in spite of an official protest from the Department of Agriculture 
pending the application, a patent was finally granted, as, under the 
law, the Commissioner of Patents has no right to consider ex parte tes- 
timony pending examination, even though offered by an officer of the 
Government in the interest of the pubile. The fact that the process 
had been fully described and recorded in official reports from the De- — 
partment of Agriculture did not prevent the issuing of the patent. So 
valuable is this treatment considered that an effort has been made in 
southern California to subscribe the sum of $10,000 to buy the right 
from the patentees. The author remarked that he personally had no 
hesitation in advising the orange-growers to pay no heed to the claims 
of the patentees, and that it would be wiser to combine to oppose them 
if suit were brought than to subscribe to give them an undeserved and 
valuable royalty. 
His own conviction was that the patent was invalid and the certificate 
but a piece of paper carrying no absoiute evidence of priority of inven- 
tion ; and it is greatly to be regretted that, through legal technicality or 
otherwise, if should ever have been granted. 
The author mentioned other cases of this kind where, after years of 
labor and large expenditures on the part of the Department of Agri- 
culture, valuable results had been obtained. In some cases they took 
the form of mechanisms, which were described and figured in the 
official reports; in other cases of mere discoveries. He said: 
There is nothing more discouraging to an officer of the Government engaged in 
original investigations, with a view to benefiting the public, than the efforts of various 
private individuais to appropriate the results, of which the foregoing ease is an ex- 
ample. I have been engaged now for nearly a quarter of a century either as a State 
or Government officer in investigations, having for their object in the main the pro- 
tection of plants and domestic animals from the attacks of injurious insects, Either 
