will be recollected, were still to be returned, after examination, to the western shore land office under all warrants issued before the first day of March 1796, and the general regulation of the act of 1795, ch. 88, required that all certificates of survey or resurvey should thenceforward be returned by the first of July then ensuing, or within eighteen months from the date of the warrants. This act, after reciting that many inhabitants of the eastern shore had, through want of information of the last mentioned provision, omitted to comply with its directions, gave them until the first of July 1797, to return, and compound on, the certificates in question, which it protected in the interim from proclamation or other warrants, except so far as they were already affected by warrants of proclamation or of resurvey, or by locations actually made under common warrants. It is remarkable that rights obtained under special warrants, so called, are not also mentioned in this reservation. It corroborates an idea arising from some other passages, that those warrants were sometimes considered as a class of warrants of resurvey, since the land which they were to affect, viz. cultivated vacant land, was always supposed to have been formerly surveyed.   CHAPTER IV.   OF CONFISCATED PROPERTY.       IT has been already observed that land accounted vacant, as not having been granted to individuals or laid off and reserved for the use of the proprietary, was in no manner comprehended by the state laws under the description of confiscated British property: the same may be said of land escheat for want of heirs, and of vacancy taken up by survey but not compounded on. The disposal of these was thrown into the customary channel of the land office. But, besides the landed property of individuals which fell under the act of confiscation, or was forfeited for treason, the manors and reserved lands, generally, belonging to the proprietary himself, were placed in the care of commissioners appointed for that purpose, and the state's right therein from time to time disposed of by those commissioners, and ultimately by either officers, under a great variety of regulations, in which, so far as related to granting titles to the purchasers of such