ROOMS OF THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY,

BALTIMORE, November 1, 1918.
To the Maryland Historical Society:
GENTLEMEN :

We have the honor to submit the Thirty-eighth Volume of the Archives of
Maryland, consisting of Acts of the General Assembly of the Province from
1694 to 1698 and from 1711 to 1729, hitherto unprinted.

We have still on hand a large amount of material which should be printed
in the Archives. When the series was begun in 1883, five subdivisions were
contemplated. Two of them, namely, the Correspondence of Governor Sharpe,
and the Proceedings of the Provincial Council, have been completed. Two
more, the Proceedings of the State Council, and the Proceedings of the
Provincial Court, were suspended when the printing reached the years 1780
and 1657 respectively, in order that the fifth, namely, the Proceedings and
Acts of the General Assembly of the Province of Maryland, might be completed.
The publication of the Proceedings, with this volume, has been completed to
the year 1732. The unprinted Acts, included in this volume, are of two
periods. Those of the period 1711-1729 were found in the office of the Clerk
of the Court of Appeals, at Annapolis, as is told in the preface of Vol. 37.
Those of the period 1694-1698 were copied from the duplicates sent to the
Public Record Office, in London, while Maryland was a Royal Province.

For the forty-four years between 1732 and 1776, at least fifteen volumes will
be necessary to complete the series. During this period, it must be remem-
bered, the Private Acts and the Proceedings of the Upper House of Assembly
have never been printed in any form. The Public Acts, and the Proceedings
of the Lower House were printed contemporaneously with the session, but the
pamphlets containing these Proceedings and Acts are extremely rare. Some
time ago, the Committee addressed a circular letter to seventeen of the most
important reference libraries of the United States and England, and found
that none of them had anything like a complete collection, either of the Laws or
of the Proceedings of the Lower House. We were urged by such libraries as
those of New York State, Harvard University, The State Historical Society
of Wisconsin, the New York Public Library, and the Historical Society of