LETTER OF TRANSMISSION.

BALTIMORE, July 1, 1925.
To the Maryland Historical Society.

GENTLEMEN:

Your Committee on Publication has the honor to submit the Forty-Fourth
Volume of the Archives of Maryland, containing the Proceedings and Acts
of the General Assembly of Maryland at the Sessions held from 1745 to 1747.

The Session of August, 1745, was the first one of a new Assembly, which is
apparently the forty-sixth one in our Provincial History.

A bibliographical discussion of the printed votes and Session Laws of the
various Sessions will be found in Wroth's " History of Printing in Colonial
Maryland."

Prof. Geoffrey Callender, in the magazine History for 1924 at page 205,
wrote: " History is surely the mastery of facts, not the mere marshalling of
them," but for that mastery the orderly presentation of these facts is vitally
important and the volumes of the Archives, carefully indexed, fulfil that func-
tion. T. R. Glover (The Pilgrim, page 125) wrote that "Historical inquiry,
like all criticism, is directed to the learning of facts and sequences and to the
clearing of ideas; it cannot alter facts, though it may affect our interpretation
of them." The study of such volumes as this leads the scholar to the conclusion
which was reached by Glover in the same book at page 55, viz: " History is
always rational; and a solution of historical problems, that depends on life and
the universal proving irrational, cannot be true."

There are a comparatively few references to this period in books not previ-
ously mentioned in these introductions. For example, the Lancaster Indian
Treaty of 1744 is discussed in Osgood's " American Colonies in the 18th Cen-
tury " (III, page 385). The valuable report by Miss Adelaide R. Hasse in the
Report of the American Historical Association for 1906 (Vol. 2, page 448)
contains references as to the Bibliography of the Public Records of the Province
of Maryland.

Dr. Percy S. Flippin's " Royal Government in Virginia," published in
1919, often throws a helpful sidelight upon conditions in Maryland.

Recent volumes of the Archives have given much information concerning
the Carthagena Expedition of 1740. Upon this subject the Virginia Magazine
of History and Biography for January, 1922, contains an interesting article