Introduction. xlix

session in having the Court House removed from Joppa to Baltimore, may
have stimulated the people of Charles Town to attempt to make that town the
county seat. The petition of some of the inhabitants of Somerset and Worces-
ter Counties to have a town laid out at the head of Wicomico River was re-
jected without explanation in the Upper House where it was first presented
(p. 288). It should be noted that at this session, Stepney Parish had been
given authority to build a chapel of ease at the head of Wicomico on its south
side (436-438).

Petitions. It was early in the 1768 session that the Lower House, by a
resolve, adopted a standing rule that thereafter, "no Private Petition shall
Pass this House unless the facts therein set forth be fully proved", and it was
ordered that this resolve be published in the next Maryland Gazette (p. 289).
Special committees seem to have been regularly appointed thereafter to report
upon the truth of facts asserted in petitions asking for the passage of private
laws. The Lower House assessed the fees to be paid to the Speaker and to the
Clerk of the house in the case of private bills which were passed. These fees
at this session varied from £15 in the case of the Mary Darnall-Charles Carroll
marriage settlement act, to £1: 10: o in the case of the four other private acts
passed at this session (pp. 402-403). The Upper House, as at previous sessions,
ordered that the fees to its clerk for private laws be made the same as in the
lower chamber (p. 315).

Variations of the compass. It will be recalled that variations of the compass
with the resulting confusion about land boundaries had been pointed out by
Governor Sharpe in his opening speech to the 1768 Assembly as a great evil
requiring a remedy, but it was "difficult to point out One adequate and un-
exceptionable." Sharp asked the Assembly to give attention to the matter so
well worthy of its notice (p. 282). On June 8, 1768, the Lower House ap-
pointed a committee of nine, headed by Thomas Ringgold, to confer with
Messrs. Prigg and Calder, mathematicians, and to report what were the proper
procedures to be taken to remedy the evils arising therefrom (pp. 359, 361).
The Committee reported that it had consulted these two gentlemen and had
been informed that there is a west variation of about two and a half to three
degrees; that this variation is now and has been decreasing ever since the first
settlement of the Province, but that "the experiments and observations they
have hitherto made do not sufficiently authorize them to say at what rate it
decreases." To determine these variations it would be necessary to make many
observations upon both ancient and modern surveys. After the rate of the
decrease of the variation is determined a good theodolite should be provided
for each county, a true meridian line set up at each court house with three
pillars of durable stone, and the variations as found by annual observations
to be recorded in books to be kept among the county records, and these varia-
tions to be considered the standard of variation for each county. The Com-
mittee felt that as the "regulation" of old surveys would occasion considerable
changes in many of the bounds and present so much difficulty, it advised that
further consideration of an evil which is daily increasing be reserved for con-
sideration at the next Assembly (pp. 282, 286, 326, 359, 361, 375-376). The