Appeal No. 2002-0251
Application No. 09/220,170
As pointed out by appellants on pages 2 and 3 of the brief,
what the examiner has lost sight of is the need to treat the
claimed subject matter as a whole and not just treat or address
the portion of the claim following the recitation "the
improvement comprising," as the examiner seems to have done in
the rejection before us on appeal. Like appellants, we find
nothing in Teich alone that would render obvious the combination
set forth in claim 7 on appeal. Contrary to the examiner's
apparent belief, appellants are not merely claiming the ballast
attachment per se, but are claiming a combination of a three-
point hitch and a ballast attachment secured to the lower draft
links of the hitch in a particular manner, i.e., by having the
cylindrical hitch bar (18) affixed to the draft links of the
three-point hitch received in the downwardly facing seat (46) at
the rear of the forwardly opening hitch bar receptacle (36). The
examiner has not specifically addressed this combination, and we
see nothing in Teich which would have been suggestive of such a
combination.
The examiner's belated attempt to recast the rejection in
the "Response to Argument" section of the answer (page 6) and
somehow rely on the preamble recitations of appellants' Jepson-
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