ALEXANDER OLIVER, ESQ., BARRISTER-AT-LAW, ONE OF THE EXAMINERS OF TITLES UNDER THE REAL PROPERTY ACT. 1877. To Bis Bonor Sir James Martin, Knight, Chief Justice of New South Wales, This Collection of Real Estate Acts is respectfully dedicated by The Author. PREFACE. IN order to prevent any misapprehension, it is proper to state, before indicating the scope and contents of this Collection of Acts, that the fact of its having been printed at the Government Printing Office implies no responsibility whatsoever on the part of the Government, either in respect of its contents or its omissions. All responsibility in connection with its compilation generally, and for any opinions expressed in the course of the following observations, attaches solely to the writer. As the title imports, this is merely a collection of the many English and Colonial enactments which have a direct bearing on dealings with real estate; and to these are subjoined, in the form of foot-notes, such decisions of the Supreme Court as appeared to determine any question of construction, or to be otherwise valuable for purposes of reference. In other words, it is an attempt to bring together, in a compact and portable form, all those enactments to which the conveyancer of landed property requires to refer in practice, or whose bearing on proprietary rights and obligations ought to be known to its owners, as well as to all persons and associations concerned in dealing with it. If the book has any value to the practitioner, it will probably be found in the alphabetical grouping of the various Acts heretofore scattered over thousands of pages, and several folio volumes, of the Statute Book, and perhaps also in the Index, upon which much labour has been bestowed, with the design of facilitating, both to the professional and the non-professional inquirer, the tedious and often difficult task of finding, amidst a mass of sections, the particular enactment sought for. And it may be mentioned here, that in order to assist persons to whom the forms in use under the Real Property Act may not be accessible, the whole of those forms, together with their very useful rubrics or commentaries, have been appended to the text of the Real Property Act. The model followed in arrangement of subjects, annotation, type, and general form, has been Chitty's well-known Collection of the Statutes of Practical Utility. An Appendix has been added, |