my deputy have a convenience to survey it. Given under my hand this 24th of May, 1663.                                         HIEROME WHITE."     " I doe hereby order and impower you, Richard Hill to cause to be marked some trees on a small tract of land, about four hundred acres, or thereabouts, lying at the head of Bohemia river, being the usuall landing in the road to Appaquiminy. Given under my hand this 26th June, 1675.                                         CHARLES CALVERT.     To Mr. RICHARD HILL."         LIBER No. 15. folio 360. ¾     The resurveys under the direction of juries, and the annual circuits made, and courts of enquiry held, by the surveyor general, are among the usages long since laid aside. The former must have been enormously expensive to the parties, and their verdicts on record afford abundant evidence of the incompetency of the people usually summoned on those occasions to weigh and compare the testimonies offered. They were not in use in the latter period of the proprietary government. As to the courts of enquiry, for holding which annually in every county a particular commission was issued to Baker Brooke, esq. in 1674, it is not known in what degree this design took effect; any more than that of processioning for the establishment of boundaries, of which there appear some traces, although I do not perceive any better authority for it than a bill published for the consideration of the people, but never passed into a law. They have been at all events so long abandoned, as to be in a manner out of knowledge at the present day.     The only remaining subject that I shall notice under this head is the proceeding by writ of extent; a thing which has indeed no necessary connection with the land office, but which nevertheless, in the jumbled situation of all public establishments and proceedings in the infancy of the province, appears like a part of the system under examination. Without undertaking to explain the term extent I will shew how the proceeding so called was applied in Maryland: The act for deserted plantations, passed in 1650, subjecting lands to forfeiture in the cases therein specified, contained an exception in favour of orphans under sixteen years of age: in the following year the proprietary's attorney general, Mr. Thomas Hatton, represented to the court that some manors and other lands were, under colour of that exception, claimed on behalf of orphans, which would otherwise have been forfeited; but that no measures were taken for paying the arrears of rent, or seating the plantations, so as to afford a probability of C c