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Lord Justice Lindley : Can we discharge the certificate ? Mr. Moulton : Your Lordships will have to discharge the certificate if your Lordships find that certain objections were not proved which the learned Judge found were proved. His Lordship certified the whole of the objections. Lord Justice A. L. Smith : If you like to come before me some time after Easter, and you both put down what you want, if I have any difficulty I will adjourn it into Court, but if not I will decide it myself. Lord Justice Lindley : It will not do to do nothing in a case like this. Mr. Moulton : It may mean that we should wish to ask your Lordships for leave to disclaim. Therefore, so far as that is concerned, perhaps your Lordships will allow this to be adjourned, so that we could come before your Lordships at a later date. Lord Justice Lindley: Are we the right people to come to for leave to disclaim ? Mr. Moulton : It would have to be done by your Lordships, because it is now before this Court. However, it is a point we should like to consider if your Lrdships will take it that it is adjourned, and not concluded. Then we can bring all these matters before your Lordships. Lord Justice A. L. Smith : Yes, we will adjourn it. Mr. Neville : Then I understand it is adjourned till the first day in next term. Lord Justice Lindley : The first day you can get before Lord Justice A. L. Smith after the vacation. He will be kind enough to hear you in his private room, and if he has any difficulty he will adjourn it into Court. It will be seen from the decision of the Court of Appeal that their Lordships agreed with Justice Eomer that the patent was bad, inasmuch as in the plaintiffs' specifications they claim the use of any cyanide of potassium in solution, no matter of what compound, it is used for the extraction of gold and silver ores ; and this contention has been referred to in my former reports— namely, that Mac Arthur and Forrest were never entitled to obtain a patent for the use of every compound containing cyanogen. If the quantity of cyanide of potassium had been specified, as well as the solution used for the extraction of the precious metals, there is no doubt that the patentees' claim would have been held to be a good one, and they would, in that particular case, be entitled to some claim for novelty. Their Lordships, however, stated that if the first claim in the specification had been omitted, the second claim might have been held to be good. The question now is that the MacArthur-Forrest patent for the use of potassium cyanide in the extraction of gold is invalid ; and, therefore, if this decision is upheld by the Court of Appeal in Great Britain, there ought not to be much trouble in setting aside their patents in any of the colonies under British dominion. Had the patentees been satisfied with a reasonable royalty, it is very questionable if a case like the present one would have ever arisen. It is but right to acknowledge that, since the introduction of the cyanide method of treating ores for the extraction of gold and silver, many of our gold-mines have been rendered more remunerative for working, and, in some instances, have been saved from the necessity of shutting-down, or at least working without profit, as m no place in the world, with the exception of Transylvania, is gold found in such a finely-divided state as it is in the ore found in the North Island of New Zealand. The battery returns furnished last year, as required by " The Mining Act, 1891," show that the value of the bullion produced in the North Island last year, about one-half of the total production, was obtained by the use of cyanide-potassium solutions. Still the process is by no means yet perfect, the great difficulty at present being to extract the precious metals from slimes, or where they are associated with baser metals, such as copper and antimony, the solution having as great an affinity for copper as it has for silver, and a far greater strength of the solution is therefore required to extract the whole of the gold and silver, while in conjunction with copper or antimony, than would be the case were the base metals absent. A process, somewhat similar to that of MacArthur-Forrest, has lately been patented, and is known as the " Sulman-Teed process," owned by the Sulman Float and True Gold-recovery Syndicate, and arrangements are being made by the Gold-ore Treatment Company to purchase the assets of the syndicate. The company was formed in December last, with a nominal capital of £50,000, in £1 shares, of which 40,000 have been issued, while 5,000 shares have been paid for the rights of the Sulman Float and True Gold-recovery Syndicate, thus enabling the latter to hold one-tenth of the shares in the newly-formed Gold-ore Treatment Company. It is said that the latter has received an offer from a firm in Western Australia of a large sum in cash in order to secure the rights of the patent for that colony. The offer was made through the agency of one of the leading mining engineers in Australia, who is under an agreement to form a large company, with a capital of £150,000, to work the patents, £50,000 of which will be used for working capital. Similar negotiations for the use of this process are in progress with the other colonies of Australia, also South Africa, America, Canada, New Zealand, and the Gold Coast. The particular value of this process is the accelerating effect caused by the use of bromo-cyanogen, which does in a few hours what, by the ordinary cyanide process under similar conditions, is usually a question of days; and, what is more important still, by this method refractory and impure ores may be treated which, by the MacArthur-Forrest process, cannot be touched. A paper was recently read at the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, giving a few instances of the success attending the use of this invention. Pestarena pyrites concentrates of 18dwt. 18gr., leached for fifteen hours with a 0 - 5 per cent, potassium-cyanide alone, yielded 34 per cent, extraction, whereas by adding thereto 0-25 per cent. of bromo-cyanogen in a parallel experiment 91 per cent of gold was obtained in the same time. Half a ton of Australian pyrites concentrates, from the Charters Towers field, was submitted to parallel tests with the Sulman-Teed solvent and ordinary cyanide (the ores had originally