share, and at last no buyer (that is, in short, the fine new word
for nothing-worth), and many families ruined by the purchase. If I
should name linen manufactures, saltpetre-works, copper mines,
diving engines, dipping, and the like, for instances of this, I
should, I believe, do no wrong to truth, or to some persons too
visibly guilty.

I might go on upon this subject to expose the frauds and tricks of
stock-jobbers, engineers, patentees, committees, with those Exchange
mountebanks we very properly call brokers, but I have not gaul
enough for such a work; but as a general rule of caution to those
who would not be tricked out of their estates by such pretenders to
new inventions, let them observe that all such people who may be
suspected of design have assuredly this in their proposal: your
money to the author must go before the experiment. And here I could
give a very diverting history of a patent-monger whose cully was
nobody but myself, but I refer it to another occasion.

But this is no reason why invention upon honest foundations and to
fair purposes should not be encouraged; no, nor why the author of
any such fair contrivances should not reap the harvest of his own
ingenuity. Our Acts of Parliament for granting patents to first
inventors for fourteen years is a sufficient acknowledgment of the
due regard which ought to be had to such as find out anything which
may be of public advantage; new discoveries in trade, in arts and
mysteries, of manufacturing goods, or improvement of land, are
without question of as great benefit as any discoveries made in the
works of nature by all the academies and royal societies in the
world.