as by suing out grants, and paying rents, agreeably to those conditions, should have their lands entered upon and seized for his lordship's use. Besides these temporary laws there was one passed in the year 1650, before the government was seized by Cromwell, entitled " an act concerning deserted plantations," which was afterwards re-enacted, and was in 1676 confirmed among the (a) perpetual laws. During the long suspention of the proprietary government various bills were proposed, connected with the business of the land office, and some of them appear to have been passed by the two houses of assembly, but not to have received the royal assent. Two were however passed into laws, the one in 1692, entitled " an act for securing the rights of several persons," and the other in 1707, " requiring the agents of " the lord Baltimore to certify into the secretary's office the " instructions and conditions of plantation, with the fees by " them demanded, and obliging his lordship's deputy " surveyors to qualify themselves according to law." The intention of the first was to give to certificates in the predicament therein described, all the force and validity of patents; and it was attended with the singular circumstance of not being preserved entire on record, the last section, which contained provisions more harsh than the rest having been left out when the readiness of the proprietary's officers to remove all causes of complaint, had shewn it to be unnecessary. The other is an act in the same spirit of jealousy, and of hostility towards lord Baltimore, which dictated the former one, and operated I presume only while that spirit remained, or until the rights of the proprietary's officers were settled by the orders of the crown. As these two acts are printed at large in Bacon's edition of the laws, it would perhaps be improper to insert them here. Other laws were passed at this and later periods, relating chiefly to the proprietary's revenue affairs, which will be noticed in the succeeding chapter. In regard to acts concerning boundaries, and the marking and bounding of lands under commissions from courts of law, besides that they are to be found in the editions of the laws now in use, they do not enter into the design of the present compilation, which is confined to the history and operations of the land office, and the modes of obtaining original titles to land. I shall now insert the three acts first abovementioned, and having in a former place hinted, in speaking of the management     (a) I shall not stop to give a full account of the design and effect of this distinction¾The questions and proceedings respecting the validity and duration of the laws of Maryland are numerous and confused. I can only observe that the second proprietary at his accession caused a complete revision to be made of the acts of assembly, and that the laws of the province were from that time considered in two classes, temporary, and perpetual.