186 court of appeals of maryland

come, and the court regularly gave during each
term an opportunity for hearing to every case on
the docket at the beginning of that term, it is diffi-
cult to say precisely, because the continuance of
of many cases and the special arrangement of
others render the docket record obscure; but in
the seventies there were some terms at which it
was done. The October term of 1870 opened with
a docket of one hundred and fourteen cases, and
the court heard the last of those in the following
February. In the eighties it was the regular prac-
tice to do this, and the court did not stop with
cases filed before the beginning of the term; at
the opening of the April term, 1885, there were
eighty-eight cases on the docket, and the court
heard those up to number 91 before adjournment.
As cases came in they were added and numbered
as of the current t^rm. In 1886,⁵ a third term of
court, beginning on the second Monday in Jan-
uary, was added, but this did not add to the time
which the court had been devoting to its work;
apparently it merely made another division of
the time—crowding the October term now.

After the middle of the eighteen eighties, then,,
the court dockets were smaller and easily disposed
of in a year. In 1890 the highest number of cases
at the opening of a term was sixty-nine; in 1895,
sixty-two; in 1900, ninety-six; in 1905, ninety-five;
in 1910, eighty-eight. Since 1915 the number has
increased, on the average, the October term of
each year usually containing considerably over a
hundred cases, and the total of each year being in
the neighborhood of two hundred and twenty-five.

5. Act 1886, Chap. 185.