When some genius brings out a machine over the plans of which he has spent half an anxious lifetime, a dozen copyists will in a year have out a dozen "improved machines," each of them better than the first one, and therefore each helping to ruin the inventor.

He had all the labour and all the knowledge.

All the others did was to add a few slight improvements, for which they get all the credit due to the man without whom they would not have had an idea.

This is, alas! very common, and cannot be avoided.
You can't make a law against one boy imitating another, or even against his stepping into the credit due to you.
It is as easy to be unoriginal as it is hard at times to be original.
Everybody falls into the fault more or less.

Why is it we can never find anything to begin a conversation with except the weather?
Somebody, I suppose, began on that topic once.