After much discussion, and long deliberations, it was finally determined in the Assembly of the XIX. that a plan should be prepared giving special privileges, powers, and exemptions, to such members of the Company who would, at their own expense and risk, send out expeditions, and establish separate and distinct plantations in any part of New Netherland, Manhattan Island excepted. The details were slowly and carefully"determined, and not till the seventh of June, 1629, was the plan finally approved and adopted by the Assembly of XIX., and ratified and confirmed by their High Mightinesses the States-General.

This plan, or charter, as it sometimes styled, was entitled : --

"FREEDOMS AND EXEMPTIONS.

GRANTED BY THE ASSEMBLY OF THE XIX. OF THE PRIVILEGED WEST INDIA COMPANY, TO ALL SUCH AS SHALL PLANT ANY COLONIES IN NEW NETHERLAND."

It consisted of thirty-one articles, and was printed in a small quarto ])amphlet of four or six pages and •distributed throughout the United Provinces in 1630. Only three or four copies of this pamphlet are now known to exist, and it is so rare that within ten years a distinguished New York antiquarian reprinted it in fac-simile.

As it is the first instrument under which lands in the States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, and Connecticut, were acquired, and on which titles rest, it is here given in full from the translation made by the late eminent historian of New Netherland, Dr. Edmund B. O'Callaffhan, for his own great work, the " History of New Netherland ; or, New York under the Dutch, "first published in 1846-