which were among the last acts of the second proprietary, and given after an experience of fifty years in the affairs of the province, would have been better observed if he had not died soon after issuing them.     No stringing was to be allowed in resurveys, or other surveys: a string was understood to be where a contiguity was attempted to be made by a mathematical line. There, was also another kind of string, i. e. where the space between the lines was not broad enough, but of this as before stated, the examiner was to judge.     Concerning the form or shape of surveys a kind of general rule will be observed in the 6th article of the instructions of the board of revenue to surveyors: but it was merely an old regulation kept up without any object for its application at the time when those instructions were issued. It will have been seen by some of the early instructions that surveys were to be as nearly as possible in the shape of parallelogram, and that the lines run upon the water side should not exceed the length of fifty poles for every fifty acres to be surveyed. We have shewn an instance of the enforcement of this last mentioned rule, and it was, in the early times, of real consequence, in giving the advantage of the water to as many plantations as possible. How long it continued to be exactly observed cannot well be ascertained; but, in the middle period of the proprietary government, as well as in the first, it was a general rule that the long lines of surveys were not to be run upon the water side, of which some proofs will be shewn among the documents and passages to be attached to this chapter. In later times, the borders of rivers, &c, being generally occupied, and the circumstances of the country altogether changed, there was little occasion for those regulations, and the last of them may be supposed to have fallen altogether into disuse. The other was kept up in form, and it is even at this moment among the instructions to surveyors that their surveys shall be as regular and square as possible¾but this, I believe, is but a dead letter, for the shapes of surveys must, for many years past, have been governed, with few exceptions, merely by the lines of the surrounding tracts, as appears very plainly from the immense number of courses in modern surveys compared with those of more distant periods.     It was a general maxim that no one was to suffer by the default of the public officers: particular regulations occur in the early periods, limiting the time for prosecuting surveyors for neglect, &c. but none that are late enough to be deemed in force at the end of the proprietary government. The general rule however was understood still to prevail.