Appeal No. 95-3789 Page 9
Application No. 08/047,047
dominance. See In re Hammack, 427 F.2d 1378, 1382, 166 USPQ 204,
208 (CCPA 1970).
In the present case, we have reviewed the appellants'
disclosure to help us determine the meaning of the phrase "on the
order of" as used in claims 15 and 19. That review has revealed
that the appellants' specification utilizes the phrase "on the
order of" on pages 2-4 and 7-9. However, these portions of the6
disclosure do not provide explicit guidelines defining the phrase
"on the order of." Furthermore, there are no guidelines that
would be implicit to one skilled in the art defining the phrase
"on the order of" that would enable one skilled in the art to
ascertain what is meant by the phrase "on the order of." For
example, one cannot ascertain if a pressure of 35 psig is "on the
order of 40 to 45 psig." Absent such guidelines, we are of the
opinion that a skilled person would not be able to determine the
metes and bounds of the claimed invention with the precision
6Our review of the record reveals that the appellants (see
Paper No. 7, filed August 31, 1992) canceled original claim 4
which claimed "a pressure of 40-45 psig" and added new claim 6
which claimed "a pressure on the order of 40 to 45 psig." In our
view, this clearly indicates that pressures outside of 40-45 psig
are now encompassed by the phrase "a pressure on the order of 40
to 45 psig."
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