people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly
in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat
raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish huge
wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and queer black
gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were held to be
necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches stirred and
whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling reporters, the
parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested people, and a jostling
confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a
style on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric
spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free sunlight
outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's Counsel wiped
the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper lip; and into this
atmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylight
filtered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a
double pew to the left of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs
that have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the
would-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....

Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as
they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for
further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of
adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the
purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of
innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world
festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one oddly