4§0 
Patents. 
^trap of hempen girthing, or any other substance except leather ; 
but indeed Mr. Martin had before used the strap of leather. 
The screw of Archimedes is as ancient at least as the age of 
that mathematician, who died more than ^2000 years ago. Diodo« 
rus Siculus speaks of it, lib. 1, page 21, and lib. 5, page 217, of 
Stevens’ edition of 1559, folio, and Vitruvius, X. 11. The cutting 
of its spiral worm into sections, for conveying flour or grain, seems 
to have been an invention of Mr. Evans’, and to be a fair subject of 
a patent right, but it cannot take away from others the use of Archi- 
medes’ screw, with its perpetual spiral, for any purposes of which 
ij; is susceptible. 
The Hopperboy is an useful machine and as far as I know origi- 
nal. 
It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that 
inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions ; 
and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs s 
but while it is a moot question, whether the origin of any kind of 
property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to ad- 
mit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventions. It is 
agreed by tflose who have seriously considered the subject, that 
no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre 
of land : for instance, by an universal law, indeed, whatever, whe- 
ther fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, 
js the property for the moment of him who occupies it ; but whea 
he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. Stable 
ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress 
of society : it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermen- 
tation of an individual brain, could of natural right be claimed in 
exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing 
less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the ac- 
tion of the thinking power called an idea ; which an individual 
may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, hut the 
moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every 
one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar 
character too is that no one possesses the less because every other 
possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me re- 
ceives instruction himself without lessening mine ; as. he who 
lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me. 
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe 
for the moral and mutual instru(^tion of man and improvement of 
his conditions, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently 
