and unsettled, which titles were secured to them by the agreement of 1732: but, that not having been able, since, to acquire legal titles, their lands had been sold as aforesaid. Without dwelling on all the provisions of the act which was passed in consequence of this petition, I shall only say that the relief prayed for was granted, the chancellor being authorised upon the proof of equitable titles, obtained prior to the fifteenth day of May 1724, by virtue of, or under, " any " grant, warrant, lease, patent, licence, or agreement" from or with any former proprietor or proprietors of Pennsylvania or their agents, to direct patents to issue for the lands so claimed, upon the payment of fifteen pounds for every hundred acres thereof, the fees of office, and the cost incurred by the state in the making and returning surveys of the said lands, as well as the costs of suit incurred on the bonds of the parties, so far as they had not already been remitted by resolves or acts of assembly; and all difficulty in deriving these equitable titles from the first acquirers down to the actual claimants was very liberally obviated; those claimants having only to prove the original grant, lease, &c. and to shew their own immediate acquisition by descent or purchase, without any notice of other intermediate titles. By a supplement to this act, (1789 ch. 14) all persons similarly circumstanced with the purchasers aforesaid were to have the same relief.     There are various other provisions respecting confiscated property which it would be proper to notice if the design was to treat of this subject otherwise than as a branch of the business of the land office, but as all that remains has relation rather to the subject of finance than to that of land affairs, which perhaps may be said of some matters that have been noticed, I shall pursue this enquiry no further, but pass to another class of laws and regulations having in like manner a partial, but a somewhat closer connection with the operations of the land office.   CHAPTER V.   OF GRANTS OF LAND FOR MILITARY SERVICE, AND PREEMPTION TO SETTLERS, WESTWARD OF FORT CUMBERLAND.     IT has been already intimated that, in the course of the revolutionary war, certain bounties of land had been promised, for the encouragement of the recruiting service. If other, and more general, bounties had not been expressly promised