own observations. We believe, however, that its waters are unfavorable to animal life; and, though a shell or two may be occasionally picked up upon the shore, yet these have been probably brought down by the Jordan. The water is excessively bitter and nauseous; and, if additional evidence were wanting, we also could testify to its great gravity, and to the buoyancy of the human body, when immersed in it. It is only by much exertion, and for a very short time, that any one can get and remain below the surface.

We went from here to the Jordan, and struck the river, where tradition says, the children of Israel passed over, when they first entered the Land of Promise. On the west side is a low bottom, and on the east a high sandy bluff, and the shores of the river are covered with aquatic bushes. The water was thick and turbid, and the current rapid, and too deep to be sounded, "for Jordan overflowed all his banks, all the time of harvest." And here crossed the Jewish nation, over this turbulent stream, "on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan." And we followed their route to Jericho, the frontier city of the Canaanites, where "the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city." There is no city now to take, nor are there any walls now to fall. There are a few miserable hovels, made of rude stones and mud, and the ruined walls of a building of the middle ages, where the wretched Arabs burrow, rather than live. Jericho has disappeared as completely as her rival cities, which sunk before the wrath of the Almighty. And it requires an effort to be satisfied, that here the great miracle, which attended the entrance of the Jews into Canaan, was performed, though the truth of the denunciation is before the eyes of the traveller; "Cursed be the man before the Lord, that raiseth up and buildeth this city Jericho."

But the length of our article admonishes us, that we must take leave of our interesting companion, and suffer him to wend his way alone to Beyroot, across the hills of Judea, or on the plains of Galilee. And, whatever region we may hereafter visit, we desire no more pleasant guide upon the route, nor a more attracting narrative to recall the mind and manners of the country, after exchanging the excitement of the actual journey for its calm retrospect in the closet.

ART. VI. Remarks on Literary Property. By PHILIP H. NICKLIN. Philadelphia. 1838. Nicklin & Johnson. 12mo. pp. 144.

Ir is universally admitted, that nothing is more manifestly one's own, than the products of his intellectual activity; and there is no species of the fruits of industry, of which the producer has a better title to the benefits;—and never, in the annals not only of legislation and jurisprudence, but also of robbery by sea or land, was a more dishonest and insolent sentence uttered, than that of Lord Camden in the House of Lords, in Great Britain, in the case of Donaldson versus Becket and Others, that "glory is the reward of science, and those who deserve it, scorn all meaner praise." For it was a reply to the author, who was asking for legal protection of his right to what was, by the universal law of nature, his, being the fruit of his labor; and to whom his Lordship, wielding his fraction of parliamentary omnipotence, says, "I take it away from you, and confiscate it to the public use, because you have received an adequate consideration for its value, in the reputation of having produced it." It is as if a martyr, appealing to the justice of a tyrant, should be told, that the crown of martyrdom was an adequate compensation for his life. It is a sheer and flagrant wrong, accompanied by deliberate mockery, that would be disgraceful, even to the red flag.

Among the objects for establishing social institutions, one is, the guaranty, to each member of the community, of his private, individual rights. If any one, by his industry, fabricates a utensil, or produces corn, the law protects him in the use and disposition of the product of his labor. But not so of the author. He, it seems, is an exception to the rule; and joins society, not as a party to the general bond, but as an outlaw, who is among us, but not of us; an infidel, to whom we good Christians, according to the old Roman Catholic doctrine, are not bound by any oath or compact, or a Jew, to raise contributions upon, and be despoiled. He is a man of too much glory to mind hunger; and so we take away his bread, he himself protesting all the while, that, maugre the glory, he, and his children too, must needs eat.

From the time when literary property became a subject of juridical cognizance in England, down to the statute of 8 Anne, 1710, securing limited copyright, and, indeed, seventy years after the passing of that act, until the decision of the case of Donaldson versus Becket and Others, in the House of Lords, the perpetual copyright of the author, or his assignees, was familiarly recognised at Stationers' Hall by the booksellers, and sanctioned by the courts of justice, both in equity and at law. This is called the Right at Common Law; by which is meant, that, merely by the construction of an author's rights and his acts according to the legal principles upon which every man's rights and property are recognised and protected, independently of any express legislation, and then again (at the epoch of that case) by the custom and precedents distinctly traceable through a period of more than two centuries, and, therefore, by the essential and transcendent principle of the unwritten law, an author and his assigns had the exclusive right in perpetuity of multiplying copies of his works, as long as he chose to avail himself of such privilege. This did not amount to a universal prohibition of all publications, except by authors and their assigns; for, as the absolute proprietor of land may dedicate it to the use of the public as a highway, by his acts merely, and without any written declaration, so an author might dedicate his published book to the public use, not only for reading, quotation, and abridgment, and as materials for making other books, which is always implied by the act of publication, but also for the purpose of making and selling copies. And the public were not to be left in doubt, whether the author did thus dedicate the fruit of his labors to public use, since he was presumed so to do, unless he entered the copyright at Stationers' Hall, and gave notice of this fact. This was a notice to the public, that, though he published his work, and sold copies of it, he did this with the reservation to himself, and his assigns, of the right of multiplying copies.

This seems to be very intelligible and very just; since, undoubtedly, the author has the absolute control of his manuscript. The community never pretended to the right of compelling any one either to write a poem for the general benefit, or to publish one he had already written; and, as the author has the control of the publication of his manuscript, it seems to be a natural inference, that he has a right to prescribe the

conditions upon which he publishes and sells it; so that these conditions are a part of the contract upon which the purchaser of a copy accepts it. And these conditions, in the above case, are, that he may make use of the copy he has bought for any other purpose, excepting that of multiplying copies. What would be the effect of such a notice, in terms printed in every copy of a work published by the author, has not been the subject of judicial decision; nor do we recollect, that the right of the author has been put upon this precise ground in any of the cases in which the question of perpetual copyright has been contested. The proper subject of legislation seems to be, in this case, not whether the author shall be entitled to what is his own by the plain application of all the principles by which the great mass of individual rights are regulated, but what notice he shall be required to give, that, by publishing his work, he does not abandon the exclusive privilege of multiplying copies.

But so deeply has the notion taken root, that an author has only a temporary right to an exclusive property in what is more emphatically his own creation than any material product of labor can be, that the framers of our constitution do not seem to have dreamed of his having any thing more than such temporary exclusive right; since they provided, for the encouragement of learning, only that Congress might grant the exclusive privilege of publication for a "limited time." Singular encouragement this! It is as if Congress had been empowered to encourage the fisheries by allowing the fisherman some part, not exceeding nine tenths, of all the fish he should take; or agriculture, by allowing the farmer some portion, not exceeding nine tenths, of the wheat that might grow upon his own land. Governments seem to consider literary productions somewhat in the light in which they formerly did gold and silver mines; one fifth, tenth, or twentieth part, and sometimes the whole of the product of which, was reserved to the sovereign in the old charters, by which this continent was originally granted to companies and individuals. There was some basis for these reservations, since the European governments, especially those of Roman Catholic countries, after the Pope had granted them their respective diagrams of latitude and longitude of this hemisphere, claimed the dominion and property of the soil. But to carry this doctrine of prerogative and supereminent dominion into

the intellectual world, and set up an exclusive right of the public to one tenth, or five tenths, more or less, of the profits or benefits of the literary compositions, which all subjects or citizens whatsoever might spin out of their own brains, is really a transcendent stretch of arbitrary pretension. But, as the constitution gives Congress an indefinite latitude of discretion, as to what "limited time" copyrights shall be allowed for, it leaves room for substantial justice to authors, or, rather, does not impose upon Congress the necessity of a flagrant and outrageous wrong to them, since the period may be so extended, as to be substantially equivalent in present value to a perpetual right.

In the case of Tonson versus Collins, which came up in 1760, Mr. Yates was one of the counsel for the defendant, and accordingly argued against the perpetual copyright. Sir William Blackstone was one of the counsel for the plaintiff, and argued very learnedly and ably in favor of perpetual copyright; and one readily recognises, in his remarks upon copyright, in his "Commentaries," the phraseology and mode of presenting the subject adopted in his argument in that case, as reported by himself. Lord Mansfield and the other judges of the King's Bench were in favor of perpetual copyright, but gave no judgment. When the last elaborate case on the question, the final decision of which, on appeal in the House of Lords, was fatal to the rights of British, and, by consequence, to those of American authors, came before the court of King's Bench, the same Mr. Yates, (we take him to be the same,) who had argued for Collins in the former case, was one of the judges of that court, and still adhered to his former opinion against the rights of authors, and dissented from the opinions of Lord Mansfield and the other two judges, who still maintained the perpetual right. The case occupies over one hundred pages in Burrow's "Reports," so that authors were not disfranchised without an honorable struggle. It is not our purpose to go minutely through all the arguments alleged in favor of this sweeping confiscation of literary property; it will be sufficient to state leading grounds.

The bombastic, puerile trash uttered by Lord Camden, on the occasion of the fatal decision in the House of Lords, has already been noticed. "Glory," said he, "is the reward of science. It was not for gain, that Bacon, Newton, and Milton instructed the world." Fine stuff this, to gloss a pillage.