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BARBED WIRE FENCES.--washburn & moen manufacturing company et al. 1)8. haish. washburn & moen manufacturing company VS. same. Drummond and Blodgett, Judges: 1. An assignment purporting to convey all the right, title, and interest in letters patent " excepting thirty two or thirty three counties, heretofore sold and assigned," without designating tha counties thus previously sold, is not so far ambiguous as that nothing passes thereby, the reservation being such as is capable of being made certain by competent evidence, showing what counties have been actually conveyed. 2. The action of the Patent Office in reissuing a patent to assignees raises a presumption of title in the assignees named, and if the defendant wished to raise the question as to whether a reservation contained in an assignment included the territory in controversy, he should have raised it in his answer, or at least have put in proof tending to show such fact. 3. Evidence almost wholly made up of the recollections of witnesses revived after the lapse of many years, and contradicted in most instances by explicit testimony of other equally credible witnesses, leaves so much doubt as to the actual existence of the device as to make it unsjvfe to defeat a patent on the ground of public use thus sought to be established. 4. Evidence of the state of the art showing the prior existence of analogous devices for substantially the same pur pose, but not fully exhibiting the device patented, operates to narrow the field for the exercise of inventive faculty and limit the range of the patents. 5. A device, in order to be patentable, must be the result of invention, but the mere mechanical adaptation of old things to new uses is not usually invention, unless in combination. 6. Invention appearing, the law does not attempt to measure its extent or degree. 7. Utility is suggestive of originality, and the fact of the acceptance of a device or combination by the public and putting it into extensive use, is accepted as evidence that it was the product of invention. 8. An inventor may, in his reissue specification, make his description more full and accurate; but he must not substantially change it so as to describe another device or cover anything njt in the original. 9. Th( original patent was for "the method of providing the wirr s of a wire fence with a series of spur wheels," and a reissae was obtained for a "fence wire provided with spurs for the purpose specified ; " Held, not to be a departure from the original invention, the only changes in the specification serving merely to give point or direction to the invention claimed. 10. Matter so described in the original specification that it might have been claimed in the original patent, may properly be claimed in the reissue.
