PROCEEDINGS OF THE MEETING. 
of astronomical instruments still more to be regretted. Among 
the subjects to which a Scientific Association may be justly ex¬ 
pected to call the public attention, I would particularly instance 
a revision of the law of Patents. The protection which is given 
to every other species of property is not given in the same extent 
to the property of scientific invention. The protection which it 
does receive must be bought of the state at a high price; an 
expense, varying from two to four or five hundred pounds, is 
first to be sustained. Then, after encountering the risk of this 
outlay, the Patentee is compelled to specify publicly and with 
legal precision, the particulars of his invention ; thus it is ex¬ 
posed to be pirated, with the redress only of ruinous proceedings 
at law; and the consequence is, that no Patent is considered of 
any value till it has actually maintained a litigation; and though 
Patents are still taken out, their chief use is understood to be, 
not so much to secure a right as to advertise a commodity. Such 
is the present policy of our laws respecting the remuneration 
of practical science, a policy which seems to have no other end 
than to restrain the multiplicity of inventions. 
“With regard to the direct national encouragement which is 
due to scientific objects and scientific men, I am unwilling to 
moot any disputed or disputable question. There is a service 
of science to be rendered to a state with which it cannot dispense; 
and all, I think, must allow that it is neither liberal nor politic to 
keep those, who employ the rarest intellectual endowments in the 
direct service of the country, upon a kind of parish allowance. 
It would be difficult also to withhold our assent from the opinion 
that a liberal public provision would have a powerful effect in 
promoting those studies of abstract science which most require 
artificial encouragement; and that ‘ to detach a number of in¬ 
genious men from everything but scientific pursuits; to deliver 
them alike from the embarrassments of poverty and the tempta¬ 
tions of wealth; to give them a place and station in society the 
most respectable and independent, is to remove every impedi¬ 
ment and to add every stimulus to exertion*.’ But I will not, on 
this occasion, enter upon a subject on which any difference of 
sentiment can be supposed to exist, nor pretend to decide whe¬ 
ther Playfair judge cl rightly of the degree in which a provision 
of this kind has actually improved the state of science in a 
neighbouring country, when lie added, that f to such an Insti¬ 
tution operating upon a people of great genius and indefatigable 
activity of mind, we are to ascribe that superiority in the ma - 
* Second Dissertation prefixed to the Supplement to the Encyclop. Brit. 
C 
