of the semi-circle to a twelve-mile radius, all which said circular lines being well marked with three notches on each side of the trees to a marked hickory standing near the western branch of Christiana Creek."

The cost of the survey to the county of Chester is exhibited in the annexed interesting report of the Grand Jury:

"Chester the 24 of the 12 month 1701-2.
"We of the Grand Jury for the county having duly considered and carefully adjusted an account of charges contracted by running a circular line dividing this county from the county of Now Castle and settling the boundaries and having duly and deliberately debated every article of the said account, do allow of the sum of twenty-six pounds nine shillings due to be paid by the county for said work.
"James Cowper, Forman"

Although there is a general impression Mason and Dixon afterwards ran the circular line, that is a popular error; nor is it true, as stated in an excellent article published in a leading American periodical, that "in the difficulty of tracing this circle was the origin of the work of Mason and Dixon."¹ The survey of Isaac Taylor and Thomas Pierson, in 1701, before described, is the only one ever made of the circular boundary between Pennsylvania and Delaware. The act of May 28, 1715,² providing "for corroborating the circular line between the counties of Chester and New Castle," seems to have been a dead letter from its passage, and was repealed July 21, 1719.

² Dallas' "Laws of Pennsylvania," vol. i. p. 105.

It is an interesting fact, in view of the ease with which the justices, in 1701, arrived at the point in New Castle where the twelve-mile radius should begin, -- "the end of the horse dyke, next to the town of New Castle," -- to recall the manner in which the commissioners of Maryland, in 1750, attempted to reach a like starting-point. In the diary of John Watson,³ one of the surveyors on behalf of Pennsylvania on that occasion, he mentions that the map of the Maryland officials had a puncture in it at a designated place within the limits of the town of New Castle from which they contended the radius of twelve miles should be measured. Watson subsequently learned that this point had been ascertained in this wise: "The commissioners of Maryland had constructed an exact plan of the town of New Castle upon a piece of paper, and then carefully pared away the edges of the draught until no more than the draught was left, when, sticking a pin through it, they suspended it thereby in different places until they found a place whereby it might be suspended horizontally, which point or place they accepted as the centre of gravity," hence the centre of the town.

As the notches made by Taylor and Pierson to mark the circular line in the lapse of time were obliterated, thereafter to be recalled only in vague and uncertain traditions, and as the story that on the reexamination, in 1768, by Mason and Dixon, of the line surveyed in 1751 by Emory, Jones, Parsons, Shankland, and Killen, that the "middle stone," planted by the latter surveyors at the southwestern boundary of the State of Delaware, was found overthrown by money-diggers, who believed because of its armorial bearing that it had been set up by Capt. Kidd to mark the spot where part of his ill-gotten treasures were secreted, had shifted its location many times, the impression became general that the stone planted by Mason and Dixon to mark the intersection of the three States had also been removed. Hence, in 1849, the Legislature of Pennsylvania authorized the Governor to appoint a commissioner to act in conjunction with similar commissioners representing the States of Delaware and Maryland to determine the points of intersection, and to place a mark or monument thereon to indicate its location. On behalf of Pennsylvania, Joshua P. Eyre, of Delaware County, was appointed commissioner. George Read Riddle represented Delaware, and H. G. S. Key, Maryland. The commissioners made application to the Secretary of War to detail Lieut.-Col. James R. Graham, of the corps of Topographical Engineers, who had acquired considerable prominence in adjusting the boundary of the United States and Mexico, to make the necessary surveys. On Oct. 30, 1849, the commissioners assembled at Annapolis, Md., where they had access to the notes of Mason and Dixon, as well as the agreement dated May 10, 1732, between Charles, Lord Baltimore, and the heirs and successors of William Penn, as also the subsequent agreement between Frederick, Lord Baltimore, and Thomas and Richard Penn, surviving heirs of William Penn, dated July 4, 1760, and the decree of Lord Chancellor Hardwick, May 15, 1730, which was the basis of the final settlement of the long controversy.

The commissioners, we are told by the accomplished historians of Chester County,⁴ at the northeast corner of Maryland -- the commencement of the Mason and Dixon east and west line -- found that the stone planted in 1768 to designate the spot, in a deep ravine, on the margin of a small brook near its source, was missing. That several years before the commissioners visited the place it had fallen to the earth, and had been taken away and used as a chimney-piece by a resident in the neighborhood, who, with some slight propriety, had driven a stake into the ground to mark the spot where the stone once stood. The commissioners at that point erected a new stone with the letter P on the north and east sides, and M on the south and west sides. At the junction of the three States the commissioners set up a triangular prismatic post of cut granite, eighteen inches wide on each side and seven feet in length. It was inserted four and a half feet in the ground, and occupies the exact spot where the