refused if "the same has been invented or discovered by any other person in this country prior to the alleged invention or discovery thereof by the applicant, or has been patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country, or has been in public use or on sale, with the applicant's consent or allowance, prior to the application.” If the description is defective and insufficient, the Commissioner of Patents "shall notify the applicant thereof, giving him briefly such information and references as may be useful in judging of the propriety of renewing his application, or of altering his specification, to embrace only that part of the invention or discovery which is new." There is a Commissioner of Patents, with a salary of 3000 dollars per annum, with an efficient staff, consisting of clerks, a draughtsman, and a machinist, and several principal examiners, with a salary each of 2500 dollars, and assistant examiners, with a salary of 1500 dollars per annum. Each of these has charge of some particular class of inventions. The patentee must "furnish a model of his invention, in all cases which admit of a representation by model, of a convenient size, to exhibit advantageously its several parts." This is deposited in the Patent Office.

The PATENT OFFICE at Washington is one of the sights of the country. This is a huge building, with four sides and a court within, not much less than Somerset House. It is constructed mostly of white marble, in the Doric style; and in it are deposited specimens of the subject of every patent taken out. The collection, as may be supposed, is overwhelming. The nation is teeming with ingenuity, and ever producing something new; everybody invents or improves something, takes out a patent, and deposits his model or sample in the Patent Office. I believe the people of the United States surpass every nation on the globe in the number of new inventions yearly produced. If this inventive spirit continues, and the population goes on increasing as hitherto, ere long all Washington will hardly suffice for a patent office. Last year no less than 5638 patents were applied for, and 846 caveats were registered. Three thousand eight hundred and ninety-six patents were issued, and twenty-eight extended for seven years from the expiration of the first term. The income of the office for last year was 197,648 dollars (about £40,000 sterling), and the expenditure 189,672 dollars, showing a surplus of 7976 dollars. In the Patent Office a variety of anti

quities, curiosities, and other objects of interest, are deposited-as the press at which Franklin worked in London; the coat worn by General Jackson at the battle of New Orleans; the coat worn by Washington when he resigned his commission at Annapolis; various treaties, as with Louis XVI.; the Declaration of Independence (a second copy, with the real signatures; the original, or first copy, is preserved in the State-Paper Office).

Grates and stoves have yielded great scope for American ingenuity; the variety of these is extraordinary. The cooking-stove is now beginning to be used in this country, and perhaps we might find it worth while to adopt some form of the grate very generally used in North America. I do not know that it is originally an American invention, but the practical people of the United States have appreciated its advantages. In places where fuel is dear, its use would be greatly conducive to comfort and economy. It is an open grate, giving a sight of the fire and the cheerful blaze so welcome to the Englishman; but it is not, like our grate, imbedded in the wall, sending half its heat up the chimney, or into the dead mass behind it. It stands out from the wall a little, throws out heat on all sides into the room, not only by

radiation, but by direct contact with the air of the room, which touches it on every side; and really gives out the whole heat produced, excepting that small portion which must ascend the flue in the warm column of air that creates the draught. It need not project further into the room than the present fender, gives no offensive odour, and, in the newest forms, is fitted with doors and regulators, and every desirable convenience. In a place like London, where the cold is sometimes severe and fuel very high in price, one of these American grates would, I feel confident, be a boon in many a family. In the Northern States anthracite, a non-bituminous coal, that burns without flame, like coke, is much used, often in stoves, instead of grates. These stoves are sometimes ill-constructed, and give out a most deleterious gas, the frequent inhalation of which must be very injurious to the health.

The first thing that interested me, on arriving in the United States, was the look of the people-a point on which I had considerable curiosity, so much has been said pro and con as to an alleged change in the form and features of the Anglo-Saxon race after a settlement of some generations in America. About seventy years since, in a work published in 1788, Dr.

Smith, President of Princeton College, asserted that then a change had begun to take place in the inhabitants of European descent, in both complexion and feature, consisting in an approximation to the Indian type. Dr. Knox holds that the climate of America causes the Anglo-Saxon to degenerate, and that already the United States' man differs materially from the European. Dr. Pritchard was informed that the heads of Europeans in the West Indies approach those of the aboriginal Indians in form, independently of intermixture. Dr. Carpenter thinks that, in form of cranium and cast of countenance, the Anglo-American races are growing like the North American Indian; and the same doctrine is upheld by a recent writer in the "Protestant Episcopal Magazine," of New York.*

These opinions have been violently

* DR. MORTON, the distinguished American ethnologist, regarded this notion as "wholly idle and gratuitous." But he himself held "the doctrine of primeval diversities among men-an original adaptation of the several races to those varied circumstances of climate and locality which, while congenial to the one, are destructive to the other." Assuming this adaptation of race to soil, etc., it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that "circumstances of climate and locality" may, in time, cause an intrusive race to assimilate in some degree to the race for which the region was specially adapted. This doctrine of the original diversity of races is