introduced a bill for amending these laws. If that bill should pass,
it will effect several important changes. It will, in the first place,
enable a poor man to obtain protection for an invention at a small
cost; secondly, it will make it more difficult than at present for a
merely pretended invention to obtain the protection and prestige of a
patent; thirdly, it will promote the amalgamation of mutually
interdependent inventions by the clause which compels patentees to
grant licenses; and, lastly, it will enable the Government to enter
into treaties with other powers for the international protection of
inventions. If you should be of opinion that these are objects
deserving of your support, I hope that you will induce your
representatives in the House of Commons to do all that is in their
power to assist the Government in passing them into law.


GROWTH OF THE SIEMENS-MARTIN PROCESS.

The growth of the open hearth or what is known as the Siemens-Martin
process of making steel, during the interval from 1869 to the present
time, has been no less remarkable than that of the Bessemer process;
for though it has not attained the enormous dimensions of the latter,
it has risen from smaller beginnings. Mr. Ramsbottom started a small
open-hearth plant at the Crewe Works of the London and North-Western
Railway, in 1868, for making railway tires, and the Landore Works were
begun by Sir W. Siemens in the same year. On the Continent there were
a few furnaces at the works of M. Emile Martin, at the Firming Works,
and at Le Creuzot. None of these works, I believe, possessed furnaces
before 1870, capable of containing more than four-ton charges,
ordinarily worked off twice in twenty-four hours. The ingots weighed
about 6 cwt., and the largest steel casting made by this process, of