the revolution, I shall proceed to an account of the measures taken for disposing of this property, and consequently to a review of those laws and regulations which regard the agency of the land office in that object; but first, it is to be observed that, although I have supposed the property of Mr. Harford to fall indiscriminately under the act of confiscation, yet, the land remaining vacant though generally considered as belonging to him, as much as his manors and other improved lands, was not, in the measures taken by the legislature for securing and disposing of confiscated property, in any manner comprehended within that description. It will not therefore, in future, be spoken of as property confiscated, but merely as land found at the revolution vacant and unappropriated within the limits of the state, and for disposing of which, without any special declaratory act concerning the right to do so, the land office was opened in the year succeeding that of the confiscation. There is one species of land, however, which was neither vacant nor within the generally received description of confiscated property, to wit, escheat land, on which the assembly exercised an authority in the year 1780, by an act of October session, chapter 51, " to " procure a loan, and for the sale of escheat lands, and the " confiscated property therein mentioned;" concerning which act I mean for the present only to observe that it employed, for the disposal of this kind of land, the agency, at once, of the land office and the commissioners appointed by a preceding act of the same session " to preserve confiscated British property," by directing, after a definition of the lands to be deemed escheat, that those commissioners should have power to agree for the sale of the same, and that on their order, warrants should issue from the land office for such escheat lands, in favour of the discoverers, &c. These are the escheat warrants which, in concluding the former book, are stated to have been issued by Mr. Callahan while the office remained closed in respect to vacant land. When this suspension was removed, in the succeeding year, the proceedings in relation to escheat lands were replaced, under the customary regulations, in the land office.     As to confiscated property, so called, that is to say, such as was placed for preservation and sale in the hands of the commissioners before mentioned, I consider it an article requiring notice in this compilation, no farther than as the land office has been concerned in completing the titles of purchasers of that property, in which respect it will presently claim some attention. But in entering upon an examination of the acts of assembly relative to land affairs, I shall pursue that order which is indicated by the relative importance to the land office of the several heads or subjects into which the enquiry divides