ii COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND

given places that they could hardly be included in
anything more than an unmeaning list of names,
left "subsisting under naked nominations," unless
the book should be expanded into a dictionary of
biography—which is not in accordance with its
purpose, and has probably been rendered unneces-
sary by the work of Conway W. Sams and Elihu
Riley, "The Bench and Bar of Maryland." It may
be thought, too, that some of the important contests
before the court might well have been described,
and there have been during the past century and a
half a few cases which if adequately reproduced
would have considerable dramatic interest for the
profession; but they are few, and are scattered
widely through the period, and none are taken up
here, except incidentally, because they have not
seemed to fit otherwise into a connected story of the
history of the court. The development of the law
through the decisions of the court has been sug-
gested as a subject which the book might be en-
larged to cover, but here again, that is a subject
broader than has been undertaken so far, and its
inclusion now would not only transform the work
but would delay indefinitely the publication of
any part of it. Indeed, some of the most Interest-
ing developments of the law, those during the pro-
vincial period, belong to a history of the Provin-
cial Court and other trial courts of the period
rather than to that of the Court of Appeals. There
has been little previous investigation of the history
of the court as distinguished from biographies of
judges; the manuscript records, in which a large
portion of the needed facts are to be found, have
not been generally accessible, and until recently